FRISCO, Texas – With a 44-24 loss to the Denver Broncos now in the rear-view mirror, the Dallas Cowboys sit at 3-4-1 through eight games with one more to go before the bye week.
They're also eight days away from the NFL's trade deadline, the final portion of the season where teams can look around the league and make deals to acquire talent to help their team or offload their roster and stock up on draft picks. It's been speculated that the Cowboys would be looking to add, especially on defense, but is that realistic given how the season has gone?
"I don't know what's realistic," Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones said following the loss. "Could one better player if we didn't pay too big a price to have a better player on defense? Could it possibly help? I'm not trying to be cute, that's why you'd go get it, is that you'd think it could help your defense."
"Are we one player away on defense? I think we're not, I think we're more than that away, but we're closer to than it looks in my mind, is executing better on defense."
The Cowboys did not do a good enough job of that on Sunday, and Jones echoed a similar sentiment to weeks past when asked if the result of the game changed his thoughts and/or sense of urgency on making an acquisition in the trade market.
"A loss is discouraging, but as far as my temperament, if I saw a proposition for us to help this team, no matter what this score was today, then I would look at it on the merits of this team," Jones said. "And if you're talking about trading for a player or trading a player, I'd completely look at it on the merits of the team both for next week or the weeks after, or for the longer term. To answer your question, no, today would not affect a decision on trading for a player."
Jones said that the Cowboys had "high hopes" coming into their road test against Denver, but it didn't happen and "we've got to get better" especially on the defensive side of the ball. Jones also posed the million-dollar question:
"At this juncture, you would look at from the standpoint of how do we go forward, and how do we play better?" Jones said. "I've said all along, you've got to step up against the running game… We got to come up and do a better job of run stopping. We knew that if we didn't do that on that front, that it was going to be a long day for us and it was."
It was a long day on the offensive side of the ball too, which was a disappointment considering Dallas came into the game as the league's number one offense in yards per game.
"Overall, what we hoped we could do was mitigate their defense," Jones said. "They've got a really sound defense. We hoped we could play better against it with our front. We were hoping that we could do a better job up front, we didn't, and we paid the price for it."
And so now that only one came remains for Dallas before the bye, amidst a flurry of other questions, the biggest one that remains is the one Jones posed himself. How do the Cowboys play better?
"The best thing you can do is address what's on this tape, and point to that and correct that with your own individual player, own discipline, own play technique," Jones said. "That's what you do in football. You take your bad plays and you learn from them, and if you don't then you keep making them and you don't have a job."
