The Cowboys owner said his former stars know what they’re talking about, even as the two railed against the current team’s effort in 2020.
Two of the brightest stars in the Cowboys’ considerable firmament spoke out this week about a perceived lack of effort from the current crop of players wearing the silver and blue. It’s one thing for analysts like Dan Orlovsky or Emmanuel Acho to roll video clips and ding guys for not hustling to the ball on a play here or a play there. Even starting safety Xavier Woods admitted that he feels every man going full speed for every single snap simply isn’t possible.
But it’s quite another thing for Ring of Honor members and revered franchise icons Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin to publicly question the want-to of the Dallas Cowboys as a unit.
And the man with the final say-so doesn’t necessarily disagree.
“First of all, I respect where they’re coming from in terms of their ability to evaluate,” team owner Jerry Jones told Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan during a phone interview Friday morning.
And evaluate Aikman did. The Hall of Fame quarterback said he didn’t see good effort during the 49-38 loss to the Browns, a game in which the Dallas defense allowed an all-time worst 307 rushing yards.
“To me, I’d be embarrassed as a player to put that kind of performance on film,” Aikman told Dallas radio station 96.7 KTCK The Ticket, as reported by USA Today‘s Jori Epstein. “That’s going to be seen by your peers for the rest of the season.”
“I didn’t see one guy on defense that I’d say had a good game,” the three-time Super Bowl champ added. “The last touchdown that Odell Beckham Jr. scored when they cut it to three points, [Dallas] had all the momentum. If they make a stop there defensively, they probably win the game.
“It’s just not very good.”
Aikman’s teammate and top receiving target was even more blunt speaking on-air with his current employer, NFL Network. The outspoken Irvin accused the Cowboys defense of giving up huge scoring days to opposing teams like they’re door prizes.
On Friday, effort was still a big buzzword during Jones’s radio interview. And while the owner didn’t go so far as to discount his former players’ opinions, he stressed- as coach Mike McCarthy did earlier in the week– that effort can be a tricky thing to adequately grade, especially by anyone who’s on the outside looking in.
“I would say that they [Aikman and Irvin] would be the first to know,” Jones said, “that when you look at a practice or a game, it would help your evaluation- it does help your evaluation; this is not to take away from them in any way- but our coach who said it: being on the sideline and knowing what you’re asking them to do and knowing some of the nuances of that particular play, the guys best suited to evaluate effort are usually the ones right down on the sidelines, the ones that are sitting there, aware before the ball is snapped, what the expectations are. And that really can give you the assessment of the effort, probably best.”
But the 77-year-old Jones allowed that Irvin knows more about effort than most, and that if the man they nicknamed “The Playmaker” sees a lack of effort, it’s worth paying attention to.
“His world is about passion, which is another way, in my mind, a colorful way, of talking about effort,” Jones told The K&C Masterpiece Show. “Michael Irvin, in the middle of two-a-days, the roughest part of all of football, padded two-a-days, you would see where he was in between practices, and he’d be down, with his pads on, in the heat of the day in Austin, Texas, out running with his pads on in between practices. Between practices!
“So when he talks about effort, I listen.”
Cowboys fans can only hope the current players have been listening, too, to all the chatter this week about effort.
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