FRISCO, Texas — It’s definitely not the start to the season that the Dallas Cowboys and Jake Ferguson had envisioned, sitting at 3-3 exiting the bye week with three of those losses being humiliations at AT&T Stadium; but they'll get a chance to get back on the road, where they're 3-0, this coming Sunday, albeit against a team that's been their most formidable foe as of late.
But in order to prepare for the San Francisco 49ers, the Cowboys had to first “look in the mirror” after the 47-9 embarrassment in Week 6, and Ferguson says the team did exactly that.
"I think, after that game, we came in and cleaned up," said the Pro Bowl tight end. "After that Detroit game, we really got down to it. Then [we] had a couple more meetings after that, and then kind of flushed it like, 'OK, stop thinking about football for a couple of days. Make sure your body does get right.'"
For Ferguson, that involved some added rest for a mild MCL sprain that cost him one of the six contests – making it clear "if I'm not 100 percent right now, I'm at least 99". Physically, that's great news for the Cowboys, but it doesn't change the fact the offense remains disjointed in the red zone, where most of their stalls and turnovers have occurred since Week 1.
Each giveaway and/or failure to score a touchdown is a teaching tool but, for Ferguson, it's not about overhauling the entire classroom.
"I think that's important every week — having a flush win or lose," he said. "It's the NFL. You are going to play one of the best guys on the best 32 teams and you've got to be sharp with whatever you're doing. So you can't sleep, you can't say, 'Oh, we won this week. It's going to be good. Oh, we lost this week. I got to do this much stuff.'
"No, stay on your process, add a little stuff here and there, but don't make it too crazy or don't try to go the extra mile. Stay on your process, trust it."
That process will be tested by the San Francisco 49ers in Week 8, and few teams have consistently been able to push the Cowboys around like Kyle Shanahan's bunch. In order to take the win in Santa Clara, it will be as much about "stepping on necks", as Micah Parsons proverbially stated, as much as it will be players having used this two week period to reflect and reset mentally.
A large part of that involves balancing needed rest with staying locked in.
"When you start getting towards the end of that bye week, you start thinking a little bit more," Ferguson explained. "You start getting a little bit more under the gameplan. Start looking at some of the [film] cutups that we're putting out there, and then getting into the normal process. You don't want to change anything when the real week comes. You don't want to say, 'Oh, I had bye week, I already did this or I already did that.'
"You want to keep that same process. So, just staying on top of that, and staying on top of your body, your mind, everything and just making sure it's a good week."
Working to keep pace in the NFC East, and in the NFC as a whole, the Cowboys will need to use a win against the 49ers as a launching pad toward and through one of the toughest schedule gauntlets in the entire NFL.
The process will need to begin paying off, effective immediately.
