Jerry Jones Says The Cowboys Won't Tank Down The Stretch

The first rule of Tank Club is don't talk about Tank Club. On Tuesday, Cowboys owner/G.M. Jerry Jones grazed the third rail by acknowledging the very real temptation for non-playoff teams to tank.

Asked on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas whether the Cowboys will rest players like quarterback Dak Prescott down the stretch once their less-than-one-percent playoff probability sinks to zero-point-zero, Jones said out loud the thing the league office would prefer to remain quiet.

"Well, we will worry about that circumstance when the time comes, but a win is very, very important in the NFL," Jones said. "And a win is important to me, and a win does a lot of positive things. I don't care when it happens. And we owe it to that mirror and we owe it certainly to our fans that we want to walk out there and be competitive. We will not try for a draft position. We won't be looking at anything like that. We'll be out there playing football and we'll bring them to play. So that's a longwinded way of saying, we'll play football under whatever the circumstances are."

But playing to win isn't an absolute. Jones admitted that he will consider strategically resting players if/when there is a postseason game looming.

"If we were getting ready to go into the playoffs, which is the circumstances you're talking about, is being eliminated from the playoffs, if we were getting ready to go into the playoffs and in three weeks, we were lining up for our first playoff game, you might give [Prescott's] status a lot of consideration," Jones said. "Because you can go in there and be healthy for the playoffs."

But aren't wins important, Jerry? It's very hard to reconcile the idea that winning overrides getting better players in the foreseeable future with the idea that winning yields to future games in the immediate future.

As much as the NFL tries to maintain a firewall between late-season meaningless games and the offseason tentpole that is the draft, more and more fans realize that, if their favorite team is eliminated from playoff contention, it's better to lose than win. It's better to rise than fall in the first-round priority. Plenty of ardent, year-in-and-year-out fans would prefer a late-season loss to a late-season win.

And with 13 of 32 teams already eliminated from playoff contention and two more (Cowboys and Colts) teetering, it's impossible to overlook the lure of strategically losing.

It's always been there. In an age of legalized, normalized, and heavily monetized gambling, the pragmatic value of taking the L undermines the inherent integrity of every game. And even if a team insists it's trying to win, the truth could be otherwise.