Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones admitted he was going to be in classic spin mode.
So, whatever came after should not have been a surprise.
But here we are.
When asked to reflect on his team’s disappointing season, finishing 6-10 and out of the playoffs in Mike McCarthy’s first year as head coach, Jones acknowledged the team fell well short of its goals.
He said the team has a lot of work to do and some hard questions to ask of itself as it tries to figure out what went wrong with a roster that he felt was as talented as any since he’s owned the Cowboys.
Of course, then Jones flipped the script, as he is prone to do, and found the bright side to a Cowboys season that found a way to extend their Super Bowl drought to 25 years while putting more fans in the stands than any team in the NFL and any sport in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our stadium is — I’m going to segue for you — but our stadium is a great example,” Jones said on his radio show on 105.3 The Fan. “I think we set, and I’m going to arm-wave, but I think we set the world record for attendance of a venue this year in our stadium, in the middle of a pandemic.”
The Cowboy averaged an NFL-high 27,377 attendance at AT&T Stadium in 2020 and little to no COVID-19 cases linked to fans coming to games, though the numbers in terms of hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus continue to rise locally in both Tarrant and Dallas counties.
“The results were extremely safe,” Jones said.
Jones credited the passion of the Cowboys fan base and the culture of the football market for the attendance numbers.
And that makes the team’s lack of the success on the field even more disappointing to him.
“The fact that we’re not getting it done, the fact that we aren’t in the playoffs right now, the fact that we don’t have a chance to get in that Super Bowl, all of that just makes me sick because this is the heyday of our game,” Jones said. “This is the heyday of the NFL. It makes me sick.”
Jones refuses to use the pandemic and the limitations on McCarthy and his staff in their first year as well as the team’s litany of injuries as a blanket excuse for the Cowboys failings.
He said other team dealt with the same things and are in the playoffs. The Cowboys are not, despite coming into the season with the aforementioned talented roster.
“We need to wear that crown and put it in the mirror and look at it. We didn’t. They did,” Jones said. “And, so, that’s very important to analyze what we didn’t do, how we managed to be some of the ones that aren’t playing. Relative to the challenge of getting better next year, we absolutely are going to take a hard look at it.
“Mike, as well as all of us, thought we had the best personnel that we’ve had since I’ve been with the Dallas Cowboys this year, some of the very best. Arguably Mike would tell you some of the best he’s ever had. And, so, we got some work to do and we will do it.”
But Jones is not down on McCarthy, who won a Super Bowl XLV with the Green Bay Packers at AT&T Stadium in 2011 — far from it. He said the Cowboys are getting started with him and will benefit from a full off season with the team.
“We haven’t even taken the first steps out of the gate with Mike McCarthy and his philosophy and what he can bring to the table,” Jones said. “The gates have just jumped open.”
In explaining why the Cowboys “fell far short of what I thought our team would accomplish,” Jones took some some blame in admitting he underestimated the impact of not being with the team early through the spring and through training camp with the change in coaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic lock down.
It was especially harmful with the Cowboys changing schemes on defense under new coordinator Mike Nolan and resulted in the unit giving up more points than any in team history and the second most yards.
”That one is on me. I’ll take that one,” Jones said. “That one should have been, when we sat down, we should have said, look, especially as we’re getting on into the COVID situation and saw that we were going to be limited with our time with the team, then putting an emphasis on familiarity, putting an emphasis on players we’ve had a lot of experience with.”
But Jones didn’t give Nolan a complete pass for pandemic shortcomings. He also blamed a lack discipline for a litany of big plays allowed on defense.
Jones, however, punted when asked if the Cowboys were going to move on from Nolan, as has been speculated.
He said the Cowboys are just beginning their evaluations on the season and the focus is on doing whatever it takes to put a winner on the field.
“There’s not but one way to face this thing and that’s work, intensive work,” Jones said. “Forget the people’s names on the positions. It’s going to take a lot of work.”
