Following Sunday’s loss to the Patriots, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones criticized head coach Jason Garrett for getting too conservative with his play calling in the fourth quarter. Now that Jones has faced some criticism of his own for publicly calling out his coach, he’s wishing he had held his tongue.
“I would say that probably if I had that to do over again, I wouldn’t comment, period,” Jones said this morning on KRLD-FM. “I wouldn’t even answer a question about it. I was asked the questions and you can always say, ‘No comment.’ But I did [comment], and I was real clear that this was a flip of the coin. That’s what Jason frankly is paid to do, is make those decisions, and there’s no one that I’d rather have make the decisions regarding our football team right now on an offensive play-call.”
Still, Jones isn’t going so far as to say he thinks Garrett was right to run the ball on three straight plays and then punt it back to the Patriots while the Cowboys were nursing a three-point lead. Jones is just saying he wishes he had kept his opinions on the matter out of the press.
The broader question facing the Cowboys is whether they trust Tony Romo to make plays with his arm late in games, or whether his huge turnovers in the Cowboys’ losses to the Jets and the Lions have Garrett thinking he needs to keep the ball on the ground when the Cowboys are sitting on a lead. On that front, Jones says he has faith in Romo -- and in Garrett.
“There’s absolutely no issue that I have with Jason Garrett’s play calling,” Jones said. “I want to get that real clear.”
Jones sure didn’t make that clear on Sunday.