Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Tuesday he wasn’t planning on any changes to his coaching staff during the bye week, but he did offer them a little help.
During his weekly radio show on KRLD-FM, Jones insisted he wasn’t taking play-calling duties away from offensive coordinator Bill Callahan, and saw no reason to otherwise adjust the staff of a team that’s 5-5.
“Say it any way you want to, I’m not even going to address — really I’m not — the coaching staff as to whether they’re safe or they’re not,” Jones said, via Tim McMahon of ESPNDallas. “We’re 5-5. We’re tied for the lead in our division. We’ve got players coming back. We’ve got one of the best quarterbacks in the National Football League. We’re off of a rough loss.
“That doesn’t call for major changes out here at all.”
Of course, there are some things they could do differently. Jones said in particular he wasn’t thrilled with the way wide receiver Dez Bryant was being used. Bryant was targeted just twice in Sunday’s beating at New Orleans, and not until late in the third quarter, when the game was out of hand.
“We need to get him the ball more,” Jones said. “I think that’s the kind of thing that’s a reasonable thing that you can adjust over a two-week period that we’re going into with our bye week. How do we work to get him the ball more?”
As to his defensive staff, he suggested more man-to-man coverage in the secondary, even though his hand-picked defensive coordinator was one of the fathers of the Tampa 2 zone scheme.
“You need to probably man up more in the secondary than we’ve been doing, rather than relying on zone,” Jones said. “Because if we can’t get pressure and we’re relying on the traditional zone as you might mentally picture it, then that’s a recipe for what happened to us the other night.”
Of course, so many things went wrong the other night that getting emotional and making changes would be rash and counterproductive.
So while coach Jones was busy, owner Jones wasn’t in the mood to start firing people.