Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones recently joined 105.3 The Fan (KRLD-FM) to discuss Dallas’ red zone troubles, a confident showing in Week 5 and more.
Here are some highlights, edited for length and clarity:
The red zone has been a bit of struggle. What’s the discussion on how to get that turned around?
Jones: “Well, we’ll discuss more as we move forward. Obviously if you run the football well, you’ll do better in the red zone. It sets up a lot of different other things and as we continue to develop our running game, I think that’s only going to help in the red zone. All you’ve got to do is look at the statistics and see that we’re struggling there a little bit right now and we have to be better if we want to be a championship-caliber team.”
A lot of times you have to go through something to know you can do it. Sunday’s game was a physical, gritty type of game. Did that one give you guys confidence that you can win whenever things are tough like that?
Jones: “Absolutely. Like I said, there’s very few football games in the NFL where you’re a minus-3 on turnovers and you end up with a W. That just doesn’t happen. Our guys never took their eye off the ball, they kept fighting and obviously when we had to have that last drive, Dak [Prescott] came through like a top competitor, top quarterback in this league.”
How would you describe the Cowboys’ running game at this point?
Jones: “I thought [Sunday] we started off slow. We didn’t run it a lot but then Mike [McCarthy] got in a groove there and certainly Rico [Dowdle] got in a groove. Zeke [Elliott] did some really tough, short-yardage running for us. We think it’s there for the taking. We think we can have a really strong running game. We’ve gotta run the football and have confidence in it. I think as the game grew, our offense and our coaching staff got very confident that we can run the football. Of course that’s not an easy team to run the football against. One of the best defenses in the NFL for many, many, many years. I thought we did a really nice job running the football. I thought [Mike] Zimmer did a great job of limiting their running game, as well. Especially when they’ve got a quarterback they’re willing to run quarterback sweeps with.”
Listen to the rest of Jones’ radio appearance here.
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