Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he has no regret about seemingly undermining coach Jason Garrett with his sideline visit during Saturday's game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Jones said he needed to talk to Garrett face to face after quarterback Tony Romo went down with an injury and the New York Giants beat the New York Jets, rendering the Eagles game meaningless. The owner wanted to talk about the plan for the rest of the game, and he wanted to make sure Garrett understood that the most important thing was season finale against the Giants.
In critical times, Jones said, he believes in "eye to eye" communication.
"It isn't just words. It's body language, it's everything," Jones said. "So it is important to me when I am down there to be evaluating. In this particular case, I did want nothing to drop between the lines communication-wise.
"We had talked about clearly what would happen if the Giants won, what we would be doing with Felix (Jones) during this ballgame and the need to have him healthy if we could do anything about it next week. But what we hadn't talked about was what if something happened and there was a question mark about Romo, how that would be handled.
"That's Jason's decision, but he doesn't need to be making that one by himself. So I wanted to very briefly step down there with just a few minutes gone in the first quarter, sit there and say, 'Here is the lay of the land, Romo has a hand injury. You make the decision, but our emphasis should be on New York.'"
Garrett said he had no problem with Jones being on the sideline or talking to him about the plan.
"It's not a big issue to me at all," Garrett said. "We are a team. We are a team as players, coaches and personnel people and certainly our general manager and owner, and we communicate. And we feel communication is important, and we just wanted to be on the same page in that situation. So I thought we handled the thing the right way in terms of not risking Tony anymore and not risking Felix anymore."
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