It’s safe to say that the 2017 season won’t go down as Jerry Jones’s favorite.
Between the Ezekiel Elliott saga and the ensuing drama with Roger Goodell, coupled with a disappointing Dallas Cowboys season, 2017 was already not great for Jones. However, seeing the division rival Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl really topped it all off.
In Jones’s view, the Eagles’ title means that the Cowboys simply have no choice but to step it up themselves.
“I think it raises the bar. I think it puts pressure on the Cowboys,” Jones said, via Clarence Hill of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “They’ve took it down to the bone and brought it back up and have a world championship and we’ve been doing the same thing, where is ours? That’s fair. That’s fair.”
Jones sees similarities between what the Eagles did and what the Cowboys are doing — and argued that Philadelphia’s adversity means that his team had no room to complain about its own issues.
“They didn’t have a quarterback either, and they got one, and then they lost him and they got one,” Jones said. “You didn’t have Zeke, so good excuse, but they didn’t have a lot of their players. So just the fact that they did it the way they did it, really for me it sure eliminates one of the real excuses. You can say that you just can’t have the kind of depth, but they didn’t have necessarily that kind of depth but they had enough that they shifted some of the ability of the team to execute their parts where they had their regulars, and we didn’t do that. We’re pretty easy to compare if you look at where they have some of their talent — quarterback, we have a quarterback — and we got some comparables to where they are, so then why not us? What’s wrong with us? They got a young quarterback, they got a young coach. They just got a better owner. Not as good a general manager but (laughing) …”
Jones is certainly focused on getting the Cowboys back to the NFL’s summit. He’ll just be a bit lighter in the wallet as he does.
