Jerry Jones simply doesn’t see a problem. And he can’t understand why the question keeps coming up.
The Cowboys owner made his weekly call-in to Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan on Friday, and he went into full-blown denial mode when asked about the team’s current running back situation.
“This is a little bit of a first for me,” he told the K&C Masterpiece show on Friday, “because I’ve never seen such made of our position and what we’re doing at that position- running back- this year and not having done this or not having done that at running back.”
The Cowboys found themselves in quite a pickle over the offseason in regard to the ground game. Tony Pollard was deemed too expensive to keep and was allowed to leave in free agency. Rather than pursue one of several high-profile rushers on the open market, the Cowboys instead brought sentimental favorite Ezekiel Elliott back on a cheap one-year deal.
Then the club opted not to look to the draft for any new talent at the position, deciding to go into the regular season with a committee that also included Rico Dowdle, Deuce Vaughn, and Hunter Luepke. Dalvin Cook was added late in the offseason, but he has yet to make it off the practice squad after a summer of working out on his own.
Given all that, the results on the field have been predictably lousy.
Over two games, only eight teams have fewer rushing attempts than Dallas’s 46. They have just 170 rushing yards; only six teams have amassed fewer. They are tied for the sixth-lowest yards-per-carry average (3.7) in the league. The team’s biggest ground gain of the season so far is 12 yards, tying them with two other squads for the shortest long run.
Elliott and Dowdle are dead even for the team lead with 56 yards each, but that puts them in only 49th and 50th place among all ballcarriers leaguewide. In fact, they both rank lower than every other club’s top rusher, and 17 teams- more than half the NFL- have two rushers ahead of them on the yardage list.
Yet Jones was blunt: he’s not even thinking about bolstering the group.
“Running back is just not on our radar as far as an area of interest,” he snapped.
The 81-year-old went even further, claiming that no one in his circle of influence is even discussing the running back position as a concern.
“I don’t have anybody else in the world asking me about this but some media,” Jones offered. “A few of the media have gotten out here and written some stories early about how we’re going to go with a running back in the draft or how we need a running back, and they’re trying to cover their you-know-what as we go through the season.”
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He summarily dismissed the idea of activating Cook from the practice squad (and not for the first time this week), saying, “I don’t know that that will happen.”
And he sounded perfectly content to stick with the rushing attack he has now, despite the uninspiring numbers posted above.
So Sunday’s Week 3 contest will feature Elliott on one sideline, with the Ravens’ Derrick Henry on the other. The Cowboys could have made a move to acquire Henry in the offseason, and most observers- including Henry himself– thought it would have been an ideal match.
Instead, Henry comes to town wearing Baltimore purple with a significantly better yards-per-carry average this season (4.2) than Elliott and Dowdle, and more rushing yards (130) than Elliott, Dowdle, Vaughn, and Luepke combined.
But in Jones’s mind, Henry and Elliott are basically the same.
“Both of these guys came out at the same time,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty good contemporary of our competition this week in Zeke Elliott. I’m pleased with what Zeke is doing.”
The emperor in Dallas has no clothes. And the Cowboys have no running game.
And the man in charge can’t- or won’t- admit it.
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