Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pointed to early season losses to the Seattle Seahawks and Chicago Bears when he explained the decision to fire defensive coordinator Rob Ryan.
"I didn't like the way we were playing in a lot of cases," Jones said in a taped interview that KTVT-TV aired Wednesday, via ESPNDallas.com. "I thought we could play better before the injuries, and so I factored that in. It wasn't like we had a lot of injuries out here when we played Chicago. It wasn't like we had a lot of injuries when we played Seattle. I didn't like the way we played there.
"It's not hard for me to go to those games and say what can we do to improve when we played Seattle and when we played Chicago, and I liked the way we played in subsequent games, and I know we didn't have the talent level on the field that we had when we played Seattle and Chicago."
The Cowboys' defense was down five starters for most of the season, and Pro Bowl linebacker DeMarcus Ware was extremely limited down the stretch because of shoulder and elbow injuries.
Some Cowboys players were shocked by the news of Ryan's firing while Ryan basically laughed at the organization and said, "I'll be out of work for like five minutes."
There are plenty of issues in Dallas, and Jones said he wanted things to be "very uncomfortable" this offseason. Moving on from Ryan isn't unreasonable. But using those two games as the foundation of the decision seems a bit misguided.
Follow Kareem Copeland on Twitter @kareemcopeland.
