Cowboys great Troy Aikman questions Dallas' direction. Cowboys great DeMarcus Ware has questions about leadership.
Late in the second half of another Dallas loss, former Cowboys star Troy Aikman couldn’t help but sound off about the sorry state of his beloved former team.
“I wouldn’t say this is necessarily over, but it’s hard to keep saying that when you’re not winning football games,” said Aikman, who called the game, a 34-17 Dallas defeat in Baltimore, as Fox’s color commentator. “I just don’t know where this organization … where they go. There’s just so many things that have to be addressed this offseason.”
Like Aikman, DeMarcus Ware, another former Cowboys star, was disappointed with the performance.
“They were down what, 14 or 17 at the half, and for me, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the first game that we can really get back and beat a reputable opponent,’” said Ware, who spoke to Yahoo Sports on behalf of his fitness app, Driven to Win. “And guess what? The guys came out and I feel like they gave up a little bit.”
But Ware doesn’t think a full-scale rebuild is necessary. Instead, he says, the Cowboys need to reload for 2021, though a few things must first happen, namely getting back a healthy Dak Prescott, left tackle Tyron Smith and right guard Zack Martin.
Dallas’ defense is the glaring culprit in its 3-9 season. It ranks 30th in DVOA, leaving many on the outside to point fingers.
“That drive wasn’t there, that leadership wasn’t there, and then some of the guys [were] not knowing their responsibilities,” Ware said, referring to Tuesday’s loss. “So I’m like, ‘OK, how did you guys actually prepare for the game?’ So it’s two things [that need to be fixed] — the guys not being prepared like they should defensively and then the leadership. I think those two things are missing that we didn’t get during the offseason.
A call for stronger Cowboys leadership
Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy didn’t name permanent captains, eschewing it in favor of game captains on a week-to-week basis. As a former team captain, Ware says an alpha (or two) must emerge if Dallas wants to get the ship righted next season.
“From a defensive standpoint, who are those really driven leaders?” Ware said. “If it’s DeMarcus Lawrence or it’s Aldon Smith, Leighton Vander Esch, Sean Lee, whoever it is, who’s gonna be that guy that, when they put that finger down, things need to get done and they get done right now?"
Ware suspects the pandemic didn’t help matters for the Cowboys. With a new defensive coordinator in Mike Nolan and no on-field work until August, Ware said the lack of chemistry-building on-field work in OTAs was far from ideal.
“That’s when the leadership is developed,” Ware said. “Because of all the OTAs, minicamps, training camps, you find who those guys are.”
When Ware joined Denver as a free agent in 2014, he used OTAs to establish himself as an alpha dog on defense on a team where accountability was everything, and there were strong leaders on both sides of the ball to make sure practices went a certain way.
“We got the offenses and defenses on the right page,” Ware said. “If we messed up in practice, guess what — we stopped practice. The coach didn’t have to. We policed ourselves.”
Sometimes it’s hard to police your friends, he admitted.
“But I started to look at it as: when I put these pads on, we’re not friends anymore — we’re actually gladiators fighting to win this battle in the coliseum we call a stadium,” Ware said.
“When you wear that ‘C’, that means that I have nominated you to be that a-hole in the locker room to get us right. Because I know that no matter what, you are going to be doing it right 100 percent of the time, and I’m gonna listen to you because you’re here before us, you’re here after us and you’re here during this process doing more and far beyond any other player that’s here.”
Where ticking off Peyton Manning worked
During one Broncos OTA practice in 2014, Ware lined up against Denver’s potent offense when Ware beat his man, turned the corner and closed in on Manning, who was not allowed to be touched. Ware noticed Manning was holding the ball low, making him an easy target for the strip. Even though Manning had a “no-touch” rule in place, Ware swiped it out of his hand anyway, causing Manning to turn and glare at him.
“He looked at me like, ‘Are you … what?’ And everybody got really quiet,” Ware said.
“And I say, ‘Let me tell y’all mother[expletive] what — if Peyton holds this ball like this and another defensive guys gets ahold of this ball and knocks it out, guess what? We’re going to lose the football game. So Peyton looked back at me and said, ‘Alright, I got you.’”
Manning got his revenge, ripping up the defense the rest of practice and, to Ware’s recollection, he put up about 35 points against the defense in the next scrimmage. He also stopped holding the ball low throughout camp, and he saw his fumbles decrease from 11 the previous season to six in 2014.
Ware suspects that display of leadership, one of holding each teammate accountable, even the great Peyton Manning, contributed to him being named a team captain that season, even though the Broncos had made the Super Bowl the previous season.
“Everybody started saying like, ‘Man, you actually struck a fire under Peyton,’ and I said, ‘That’s what leaders do,” Ware said. “It’s like he remembered, it pissed him off. So I’m like, that’s great.”
That’s what Dallas’ woebegone defense could use more of. The good news for Cowboys fans, Ware says, is that some members of the team — including Vander Esch and Smith, friends of Ware’s and contributors to his new app — already get it.
“I just want them to bounce back,” Ware said. “You’ve got to bounce back and finish the season with a good taste in your mouth so you can go into next season saying, ‘Hey, we didn’t start off right, we ended good — now we get everybody back during the offseason, let’s build that character and do what we need to do to win football games.’”
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