Cowboys owner/GM Jerry Jones joined Shan & RJ in the wake of their disastrous performance vs. the Saints to discuss if their run defense is fixable, if Mike Zimmer made any adjustments during the loss to New Orleans, why the team struggles against coaches from the Shanahan coaching tree, and more.
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00:00Jerry, in the offseason, you had talked about the run defense.
00:19We've all talked about that as a weak spot for the Cowboys.
00:25Does this make you worry that what you guys did to address it is not going to work with
00:30what Alvin Kamara and the Saints did run game-wise?
00:35What you saw was an addressing of the run game during the offseason.
00:41You saw the fact that we are doing some things differently in the run game, and you saw the
00:49results of it not being done well.
00:53So you've got to do what we change to do.
00:57You have to do that better than we did out there, to almost be trite to say that.
01:02But the point is that the players that we have can do it better, and each one of them
01:07cumulatively will make that defense better.
01:13It looks dramatic, but these are not dramatic things that can be corrected.
01:23That's what I'm talking about.
01:24And so you basically take, if you will, the group as a whole, and again remind what the
01:34principle of the defense is, and then you go out there and you just do it with a complete
01:40understanding of, if we don't do it, if we're not where we're supposed to be, if we're not
01:45there at the time we're supposed to be, if we let this guy get to us at a certain time,
01:51we could basically have the results we had Sunday.
01:55Jerry Jones here on 105.3 The Fan.
01:57Jerry, besides Coach Zimmer, what were some of those other things that you guys did to
02:02address the run D that you felt good about?
02:06Well, we got bigger in the middle, and we are bigger in the middle than we have been.
02:13And principally that's it, and we've got linebackers, I think, that have better skills at defending
02:21the run and are basically very capable of reading, if you will, reading what the guy
02:37in front of you is doing.
02:39We didn't look like that Sunday, but that's what we've done to address it.
02:44Jerry, do you feel that when your team gets, like you mentioned, they came in with a plan,
02:50they took it to you, do you feel like when your team gets punched in the mouth early
02:54in a game that they sometimes struggle to respond?
02:58Well, when you don't respond, you always feel like that.
03:03You always feel like that.
03:06Since I was in high school, if you have a team come out, they're playing well, they
03:11make some good plays, and they continue that doing all play long, you say, well, you didn't
03:15come to play.
03:16You didn't give effort.
03:19That's the game.
03:22That kind of, whether you're observing it or whether you're playing it, that's exactly
03:28what the game does.
03:29At the end of the day, when you have two halves of play like that, you'll feel like your team
03:39wasn't prepared, didn't respond.
03:42That's as old as the game itself.
03:45You always feel like that.
03:47Jerry, what