Jones spars with radio hosts over Cowboys’ woes

Todd Archer, ESPN Staff WriterOct 15, 2024, 11:03 AM ET

Todd Archer is an NFL reporter at ESPN and covers the Dallas Cowboys. Archer has covered the NFL since 1997 and Dallas since 2003. He joined ESPN in 2010. You can follow him on Twitter at @toddarcher.FRISCO, Texas — Jerry Jones got heated during his weekly radio appearance Tuesday when he was about to be asked whether the Dallas Cowboys’ lack of aggressiveness in the offseason has played a part in their 3-3 start.

The Cowboys’ longtime owner and general manager appeared to even threaten the jobs of hosts Shan Shariff, R.J. Choppy and Bobby Belt.

“Listen, let me tell you what I’ll do about it, I will let us sit down and look at the decisions we’ve made over the last several years. OK? I’ll look at it,” Jones said Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “Now if you think I’m interested on a damn phone call with you over the radio and sitting here and throwing all the good out with the dishwater, you’d have got to be smoking something over there this morning. I’m not. And I really don’t … and I don’t even want our listeners listening to me talk about. This is not your job. Your job isn’t to let me go over the reasons that I did something and I’m sorry that I did it. That’s not your job.

“That’s not your job or I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions, men. No, no. I’m not kidding.”

Jones was traveling Tuesday to Atlanta for the fall NFL league meeting, but the fallout from the Cowboys’ worst home loss during his tenure — a 47-9 defeat to the Detroit Lions — is still ringing.

“You’re not going to figure out what the team is doing right or wrong,” Jones told the 105.3 hosts. “If you or any five or 10 like you, you need to come to this meeting I’m going to today — the 32 teams here. You’re geniuses. OK. Y’all really think you’re going to sit here with a microphone and tell me all of the things that I’ve done wrong and without going over the rights?”

Jones backed the strength of the Cowboys’ roster.

“Well, first of all, where you going to go to get any players? Seriously? Where are you going to go to get any players for next week against San Francisco?” Jones said, referring to the Cowboys’ next game following their Week 7 bye. “Now, No. 1, I’ve seen these players. I’ve seen every single one of them execute like you want the plays to be executed and do their job within the role. That didn’t happen the other day, and we paid the consequences for it. But I’ve seen the players do it.”

“This is not your job. Your job isn’t to let me go over the reasons that I did something and I’m sorry that I did it. That’s not your job. That’s not your job, or I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions, men. No, no. I’m not kidding. You’re not going to figure out what the team is doing right or wrong. … Y’all really think you’re going to sit here with a microphone and tell me all of the things that I’ve done wrong and without going over the rights?”

Jerry Jones to radio hosts on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas

Jones mentioned Dallas’ recent record-breaking deals with quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb and also cited Dallas’ “short-handed defense,” which has been ravaged by injuries in recent weeks.

“I know we have outstanding personnel,” he said. “Very outstanding personnel. We’ve just made our quarterback the highest-paid player in the NFL. We just topped the receiver list charts. So we made our bed relative to how we’re going to approach with our key people. We were short-handed out there on defense, but everybody gets short-handed. That’s really not an excuse in the NFL. Your depth should step up there and you should be able to — if you can — to compensate to some degree. You can’t compensate for the gap, so to speak, that we had between the way our offense played and the way we were supposed to play.

“Now I’m going to give Detroit a lot of credit. They came after us and got after us and they put guys on top of every offensive lineman you had, and they came at it and put the kind of pressure that gave Dak a lot of problems and gave our running game a lot of problems. We’ve got to be able to handle that.”

Earlier in the interview, Jones did not let a question get finished about a potential head-coaching change with Mike McCarthy, noting he had done so one other time in 2010 from Wade Phillips to Jason Garrett.

“And I won’t be making any others during the season,” he said.

The Cowboys were 1-7 at the time of Phillips’ dismissal, and Jones expressed some regret about the move because Phillips went on to win a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos as their defensive coordinator.

Jones said that in-season coaching changes generally “aren’t good, and they’re usually ineffective. They just aren’t good.”

The Cowboys have the 25th-ranked defense in terms of yards and rank 30th in points per game after finishing last year fifth in both categories. They have had numerous injuries to overcome, including four starters who have missed at least one game: Micah Parsons, DeMarcus Lawrence, Eric Kendricks and DaRon Bland.

Offensively, they are averaging 21 points per game after finishing No. 1 last year at 29.9 points per contest. The Cowboys’ 11 giveaways are the second most in the league.

“There will be one Super Bowl champion. What the others do wrong? There’s one Super Bowl champion,” Jones said. “Now we want to be that champion, and I’m sure not throwing the towel in today because of what happened out there Sunday.

“But I’m not going to sit here and waste a lot of energy, a lot of time and ‘Let’s talk about what I should have done about the ’07 or 2017.’ Come on. Come on. I’ve got more time than that and I don’t even have time on this great show for looking back at decisions.”