ARLINGTON, Tex. – Dez Bryant took a fun approach to what he views as a serious issue following his Dallas Cowboys’ 26-20 home victory over Tampa Bay on Sunday, calling out “bandwagon-jumping fake fans.”
“I’m talking to the fake Cowboy fans, I’m talking to the bandwagons, I’m just talking about everybody,” Bryant said. “First off, just jump off. Jump off.”
Bryant, who finished the game with a team-high eight catches for 82 yards, is privately irate at “Embrace Debate” media members who feign support for the Cowboys as a method of self-promotion. But his remarks after Dallas vaulted to a 12-2 record were also meant as a defense of rookie QB Dak Prescott, who like Dez performed poorly in a loss at New York.
“We lost one game,” Dez said. “We were 11-2. Like c’mon, man, this guy (Prescott) put us in this position and you just get to talking crazy. You know, we have one bad game, it’s crazy. This is why everybody gets blocked out.
“We’ve got to focus on ourselves and not paying attention to the noise. Like the fake praise, we’ve got to treat the fake praise like hate. It’s all the same.”
Some of the noise, of course, emanates from Dez and Dak’s boss, owner Jerry Jones. Jerry talks up the idea of Tony Romo’s involvement as much as anybody. I asked Jerry about Dak’s ability to block out the “noise” and Jones praised him for it – and praised him for a game in which he committed no turnovers, threw just four incompletions and supplemented fellow rookie Ezekiel Elliott’s ground excellence by running for a TD himself.
I posed the same question to Dez.
“Ignore the noise,” Bryant told me. “These (critics) run their damn mouths. They don’t understand the philosophy of football. … That’s for those fake fans. Shut the hell up and let us work. … Fake fans.
Back up. Get back.”
