FRISCO, Texas — When the Dallas Cowboys said their message going into this season's bye week was that everyone involved in the 3-3 record needs to "look in the mirror", it gave a fairly sizable hint toward what the approach would be by the front office as far as potential roster moves are concerned — Mike McCarthy’s job stability not being in question.
With the coaching staff as a whole expected to remain, well, whole, coming out of the bye week to take on the San Francisco 49ers, the next question easily involves how owner and general manager Jerry Jones might look to improve the roster.
His answer is not to look outward, but rather to look inward like, you guessed it, in a mirror.
"Well, first of all, where are you going to go to get any players?" Jones asked 105.3 The Fan when posed the question. "Seriously, where are you going to go to get any players for the next week in San Francisco? Now, No. 1, I've seen these [current] players, I've seen every one of them execute like you want the plays to be executed and do their job within the role.
"That didn't happen the other day and we paid the consequences, but I've seen the players do it."
Part of the issue has been a glaring demolition of the team by injury over the past few weeks, with defensive linemen DeMarcus Lawrence, Marshawn Kneeland and wideout Brandin Cooks all being moved to on injured reserve as All-Pro cornerback DaRon Bland does his best to return from that list.
It all adds insult to literal injury by way of the loss of defensive end Sam Williams to a torn ACL suffered at the outset of training camp, and with former First-Team All-Pro linebacker Eric Kendricks joining all-world linebacker Micah Parsons in being sidelined against the Lions (Parsons having now missed the last two games with a high ankle sprain), it's been ugly.
Like, ahem, Wanda from In "Living Color" kinda ugly.
But as assistant defensive line coach Greg Ellis noted on Tuesday following the devastating loss at home to the Lions, teams "aren't gonna cancel any games for us", and excuses will fall on deaf ears.
The onus is on the Cowboys' role players to step up in the absence of star players, and for healthy star players to play to their potential.
Neither of those two things occurred in Week 6.
"I know we have outstanding personnel — very outstanding personnel," said Jones. "We just made our quarterback the highest paid player in the NFL. We've just hopped the receiver list charts. So we made our bed, relative to how we're going to approach it with our key people with the team.
"We were short handed 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 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."
It's a perfect storm of poor defensive play and poor offensive play with the only saving grace in any of the home losses having been special teams, i.e., Brandon Aubrey and KaVontae Turpin, in what's become a sandwich of dilemmas; with the meat of it being degraded by the state of the bread it's been placed between.
True: Players returning from injury can and will likely help, because of who the names are.
Also true, however, is what executive vice president and director of player personnel Stephen Jones explained to 105.3 The Fan on Monday.
"I think it's just part of it," he said of the injury bug sinking its fangs into Dallas. "We've gotta get players back that are obviously gonna help, to get some of your better football players back out on the field, but there's more to it than that. As I said, you've gotta execute, protect the ball and then create situations where you can get the ball.
"I think that's one of the things that led to our success the previous three seasons, when we won 12 games, we were getting the ball and we were protecting the ball. Right now, we're doing neither of the above. There's a lot of different things we have to do as a team moving forward if we ultimately want to have the success we think this team can have."
With the NFL trade deadline looming on Nov. 5, there's nothing imminent from the Cowboys as far as that type of acquisition, and while they've added a name or two due to injury (e.g., K.J. Henry, Seth Williams), it doesn't appear they'll be on the hunt for a high-profile mercenary in free agency, either.
What they are hunting, it seems, is simply a lot more production from those already under contract.
