Jerry Jones took issue with being questioned about the Dallas Cowboys’ roster and perceived lack of offseason moves during his weekly radio appearance on Tuesday morning.
Jones didn’t stop there, however, as the team owner and general manager appeared to threaten the jobs of hosts Shan Shariff and R.J. Choppy during the course of the interview on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. Jones was speaking two days after the Cowboys (3-3) fell flat on his 82nd birthday with a lopsided 47-9 setback to the Detroit Lions.
Jones was being interviewed while traveling to Atlanta for the fall NFL league meeting.
The hosts’ questions about the Cowboys’ relatively quiet offseason rankled Jones.
“This is not your job. Your job isn’t to let me go over all the reasons that I did something and I’m sorry that I did it. That’s not your job. … I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions, men. I’m not kidding.
“You’re not going to figure out what the team is doing right or wrong. If you are, or any five or 10 like you, you need to come to this (NFL) meeting that I’m going to today with 32 teams here, you’re geniuses.
“You really think you’re gonna sit here with a microphone and tell me all of the things that I’ve done wrong without going over the rights?”
Jones was quick to note the Cowboys’ record-breaking deals with star quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb.
“I know we have outstanding personnel,” he said. “Very outstanding personnel. We’ve just made our quarterback the highest-paid player in the NFL. We just topped the receiver list charts. So we made our bed relative to how we’re going to approach with our key people. We were shorthanded out there on defense, but everybody gets shorthanded. That’s really not an excuse in the NFL. Your depth should step up there and you should be able to — if you can — to compensate to some degree. You can’t compensate for the gap, so to speak, that we had between the way our offense played and the way we were supposed to play.
“Now I’m going to give Detroit a lot of credit. They came after us and got after us and they put guys on top of every offensive lineman you had, and they came at it and put the kind of pressure that gave Dak a lot of problems and gave our running game a lot of problems. We’ve got to be able to handle that.”
Jones and the Cowboys have a bit of time to cool off after the team’s loss on Sunday. Dallas, which is currently on its bye week, returns to action on Oct. 27 against the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara, Calif.
