FRISCO (105.3 The Fan) - Jerry Jones was telling a joke. And anybody who pretends otherwise - including anyone claiming to feel "disrespected" by the Ezekiel Elliott-related quip - is telling a fib.
A handful of us corralled the Cowboys owner on Saturday night after the team's preseason win over the Rams in Hawaii. The on-the-record conversation eventually turned to the subject of the performance of rookie running back Tony Pollard vs. the holdout absence of Elliott.
"Zeke who?" Jones said, cracking up himself and the rest of us, too, because we all immediately recognized the silliness of it.
Jones then added, gesturing into a camera, "We're having some fun - and NOT at your (Zeke's) expense.
Jones could not have made it more clear that he wasn't implying Pollard would make up for the regular-season absence of Elliott.
"If he continues this through the next several weeks, that'll really complement what we're doing with Zeke," Jones said. "Not replace that, and I mean that. And nobody's getting cute here. It'll certainly be a great complement to have a great running game. I can picture those guys in the same sets at the same time out there really giving those defenses fits."
That's the real news here: That an Elliott/Pollard combo might find itself on the field at the same time.
Unfortunately, Zeke agent Rocky Arceneaux has chosen to ignore the proper context of the joke to instead feign a feeling of "disrespect."
"I didn't think it was funny and neither did Zeke," Arceneaux tells ESPN's Chris Mortensen, "we actually thought it was disrespectful."
Rocky knows better. So does any Cowboys watcher who has spend any portion of the last 30 years monitoring "JerrySpeak." You can find the joke "unfunny" if you wish. But you cannot pretend the joke shows any "disrespect" to a player who is skipping work while under contract with Dallas insisting it is willing to pay the two-time NFL rushing champ "top-five" (and maybe even top-two) salary among NFL running backs.
If they wished to, it's actually the Cowboys who could claim "disrespect," because Jerry has backed this player to such a degree that when Zeke was in behavioral trouble in 2017, the owner was willing to fire the NFL commissioner over it.
Elliott, by the way, zipped into DFW over the weekend but has since returned to Cabo San Lucas to continue training.
The player in this poker game doesn't have very many cards to play; a holdout is one of his few. Jerry, meanwhile, has a go-to card in this situations, which is to break up the tension with humor - maybe in this case, gallows humor.
Elliott has lived a Cowboys life long enough to be able to "translate Jerry." So has every NFL agent. And, Cowboys Nation, so have you. Arceneaux' play for public sympathy here is a transparent and ineffectual one, because anybody who fails to understand Jerry Jones here is guilty of willful ignorance.
