The Cowboys local television ratings have been dropping this season and that's clearly something Jerry Jones doesn't like to see.
Sunday's game earned a 31.3 rating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Last year's Cowboys-Giants game at Cowboys Stadium scored a 41.6 share. Although the two games were played at different times of the day and season, the decline is becoming a trend.
So why are they declining? Is it because the team isn't winning? Is it because they don't play an exciting brand of football? Is it because fans are bored with watching Tony Romo, Jason Witten, Miles Austin, DeMarcus Ware and Jay Ratliff, players that have been in Dallas for the better part of the last decade?
Jones has his reasons and he gave a few of them on Tuesday.
"You have a lot of things that go into comparing from one year to the other," the Cowboys owner and general manager said on 105.3 The Fan [KRLD-FM]. "The comparison we have I think was the largest year we ever had watching TV, so all of that doesn't concern me. I want everybody in town, I want 100 percent percentage watching the Cowboys. The way to get that though is to have games that everybody wants to see. These Giants games last year, when we opened up last year against the Jets we were a little down from the very opener. Well, we opened up against the Giants. We played the Giants last year for all the marbles. So you can go into all these kinds of reasons. The answer is that we're in football country and I'm proud of it."
One excuse Jones will not make is that the core group of players mentioned earlier has become stale among the fan base.
"Do you think Romo's exciting to watch? Of course he is," Jones said. "Is Jason Witten worth watching and coming to see? Maybe in the top five of all the players we've had, you can go to the person as well as the player. Certainly Miles Austin has proven that he can make exciting plays. He's been dealing with hamstring (injuries), but he can. Apart from that, we probably have – and I'm going to pull this one out of my head here – but we probably had at least 50 percent of our players that weren't on our roster two years ago on the field the other day. So stale would not be the word for it.
"What we don't like, and I'm telling you that it makes me sick, is to be sitting here winning half the games, losing half the games, that type of thing. We've got too good of players, and that's not an indictment on your coaches, that's not indictment on anything, we just have too good of players. We spend a ton of money. We got to figure out a way to have a better percentage of wins."
