Cowboys coach put on notice with season on brink of chaos

Jones opened his wallet in the off-season and wants to win now, writes Mark Maske.

It was clear before the season how much Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had invested financially in this year’s team: He handed out several contract extensions, including a record-setting deal to end running back Ezekiel Elliott’s holdout.

It became clear on Sunday, as Jones vented about his team’s coaching while standing in a tiny side room within the visitors’ locker-room at Gillette Stadium, following a narrow loss to the mighty New England Patriots, just how much the Hall of Fame owner also has invested emotionally in this season’s team.

“I am very disappointed and frustrated,” Jones said as part of Sunday’s calm but biting assessment of the team, head coach Jason Garrett and his staff.

The Cowboys (6-5) still lead the NFC East by a game over the Philadelphia Eagles as they prepare to host Thursday’s Thanksgiving matchup with the Buffalo Bills. The 13-9 loss to the Patriots in Sunday’s wind and rain in Foxborough, Mass., wasn’t even that close to being the Cowboys’ most galling defeat of the season. They lost to the New York Jets in mid-October — when the Jets were 0-4.

But this was the loss that caused Jones’ exasperation to spill out.

“You should be able to come up here in a season with a good team and be able to play the New England Patriots, with the way they’re going during these years and pegged with the home-field advantage in this climate, you should be able to come in here and lose a game and not have it ( be) a statement game one way or the other about your team,” he said. “We’ve managed to get ourselves in a position where playing this game was a statement game about us.

“And there’s no shame here. But there’s none of that good moral victory here at all. It puts us in a real challenging spot, relative to the rest of the year in the standings. But we knew that. The Jets set it up ... So we set this up for this kind of conversation before we ever got here.”

The Cowboys’ once-promising season has descended into fullscale chaos. Few NFL coaches are ever put on notice as publicly and as forcefully as Garrett was. He’s in his 10th season as the Cowboys’ head coach (including a half-season in 2010) and has been to the playoffs three times, with a post-season record of 2-3 and no appearances in the NFC title game.

The Cowboys made no changes to their coaching staff in the aftermath of Jones saying Sunday

that “the fundamentals of football and coaching were what beat us out there.”

Jones said “special teams is 100 per cent coaching” after watching his team miss a field goal and surrender a blocked punt. He said he didn’t “want to get into anything about coaching, relative to changes” after watching those special teams gaffes and seeing Garrett opt for a field goal rather than dialing up a fourth-and-seven gamble from the New England 11-yard line when trailing by seven points with just more than six minutes remaining.

Oddsmakers are releasing their assessments of the favourites to be Garrett’s successor.

Jones upped the stakes before the season when he opened his wallet.

The Cowboys signed Elliott in early September to a six-year, $90 million extension that made him the NFL’s highest-paid running back. That came after other big deals given to pass rusher DeMarcus Lawrence, linebacker Jaylon Smith and right tackle La’el Collins. The moves signalled that Jones wanted to give this Cowboys team every chance to make a run deep into the playoffs.

The Cowboys haven’t reached the Super Bowl since the 1995 season, when they won their third title in four seasons.

Quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver Amari Cooper remain in line for big paydays, and at times this season Prescott has resembled an MVP candidate. The Cowboys are first in the NFL in passing offence and total offence. They’re eighth in rushing offence and sixth in scoring offence. They’re also in the top 10 in total defence, scoring defence and passing defence.

And yet they haven’t beaten a team with a winning record.

“We’ve got to get over the hump, simple as that,” Prescott said Sunday.

“Fortunately, in some ways, we still control our destiny. So that’s the good part about it. And we’ve just got to figure it out and beat some of these good teams to put ourselves in position to make it to that tournament and to be able to beat those teams then.”

The Bills, at 8-3, are a formidable Thanksgiving opponent.

“I look at it as a one-game season,” Prescott said. “We’ve got a quick turnaround. This thing is behind us. It’s already behind me. It’s behind this team ... We’ve got a quick one coming up on Thursday, and we can’t have a hangover. We’ll be ready.”