Tyrone Smith has a back injury that might prevent him from playing on Sunday, and this is something that makes the Eagles players very happy. Smith’s sub, left tackle Chaz Green, will take his place and according to Jerry Jones he will do the job, and the Cowboys will not feel Smith’s absence.
In an interview that Jones gave for 105.3 The Fan in Dallas on Tuesday, he stated that “I’d like to hope that Tyron is back.” He continued and added, “But I’ll assure you that we will have that, if Tyron is not back, we will personnel-wise as well as technique wise, we will do better.” If we take last Sunday’s game as a reference, it is very clear to everyone that they can’t do worse than that.
Jerry then continued by saying “I think that we didn’t, we’ve got a term we say, ‘block them up,’ which almost sounds trite. We just did not, not only assess, but execute as we would like to. And I think Jason Witten said it the best. It was a total zeroing in on one player, but it was a team concern, or a total team production activity that created it. Blocking takes a lot of people and it takes trying to get more hats on them so to speak than they’ve got on defense. And we weren’t able to get it done.”
In the Falcons game, Cowboys pretty much left Chaz Green to manage by himself and never bother to adjust accordingly so the guy could have some help cover tight ends or running backs. But Green wasn’t in the pickle by himself. Quarterback Dak Prescott also took a beating on Sunday, and that is mostly thanks to the fact that they didn’t select enough plays that would draw Prescott away from the heat. If you recall, the Falcons DE Adrian Clayborn had a field day with Prescott and pretty much used him as his personal sack puppet racking up six sacks.
Jerry also had something to say about that, and it was “We’ve assessed it pretty good, got a handle around technically what went wrong. They play what we call a ‘wide nine’ technique, which basically puts those ends way outside, both of their defensive ends way outside. We don’t see that much. And we probably, on hindsight, will have probably alternate how we handle that if we had it to do over again.”
There was also a statement from Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz, who basically said that things could have gone worse for the Cowboys. He stated “They might have taken more sacks in that game if Prescott hadn’t been able to get away. Adrian Clayborn had another one in his hands. He might have had seven sacks in that game.”
Bottom line to all of this is – If Cowboys Tyron Smith doesn’t make it to the field on Sunday’s game against the Eagles, Chaz Green will have a difficult task, and Philly fans might get to see the flashback from almost 10 years ago when their own Winston Justice gave up six sacks to Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora.
