Sal Monella

Man among boys
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Cowboys owner Jerry Jones keeps trying to get that lawnmower started.

Jones, who seems to think that the right combination of words will light a fire under his underachieving team, has tried after recent losses to call out coach Jason Garrett and to unconditionally support him. After last night’s loss to the Bears, Jones tried a different approach: Subtly but unmistakably, he called out the players for not playing well enough.

“These guys are mentally OK for me, and all these guys are talented enough for me, so that’s good,” Jones said, via Todd Archer of ESPN.com. “I’m questioning how to put together a coordinated one that complements each other, how to put together a team that can win a football game. . . . We’re not collectively getting together as a team and doing the things it takes to win ball games.”

Jones, who made himself the General Manager of the franchise when he purchased it 30 years ago and who continues to serve in that role, could be overlooking his own failure to recognize that individual pieces need to fit together in a way that enhances their abilities. And maybe, after all these years, he still hasn’t cracked the code on how to get the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Regardless, Jones thinks he can talk his team into doing what it has, in recent weeks, consistently failed to do.

“It’s leveled out here,” Jones said. “It’s losing, losing, losing. I’m not trying to be funny here, but the point is we’ve got to win a football game. I don’t care what the standings are, what the numbers are. We had thought that we could come up here and play a good team, play a fine football game and get our act to where we’re starting to look like a team that could — if we by the slim chance get in the playoffs — where we could win. We can’t do that until we play and start winning the football games, and we’ve got three more to play. When we do that, we can go.”

But they haven’t. And Jones seems to be increasingly desperate to make it happen. It’s fair to ask, however, whether his efforts to coax a victory from his players and his coaching staff is actually making things worse.
 
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