Getty DeMarcus Lawrence
Leave it to DeMarcus Lawrence to meet Doug Pederson’s Week 7 guarantee with extreme prejudice.
Unlike many of his Dallas Cowboys teammates who took a sportsmanlike approach, the boisterous defensive end leveled Philly’s head man with a message that bordered on threatening.
“Tell him to come on. We ready,” Lawrence said Friday, via ESPN. “Can he play the game? So he might want to shut his ass up and stay on the sideline. He can’t play the game for them. The Eagles got to play them and he’s supposed to sit on the sideline and do whatever he wants to do. But he can’t play the game for them so we’ll see.”
Pederson, no stranger to headlines, grabbed center stage of the impending NFC East rivalry game Sunday night at AT&T Stadium. On the heels of Dallas’ horrific loss to the Jets, the Super Bowl-winning coach twisted the knife deeper, promising to send the Cowboys below .500 while grabbing hold of the division lead.
“We’re going down to Dallas and our guys are going to be ready to play,” Pederson declared on local radio, via SI.com. “And we’re going to win that football game, and when we do, we’re in first place in the NFC East.”
Perhaps realizing that his opponent doesn’t need more bulletin-board material, Pederson almost immediately backtracked, arguing in a separate radio stint that “I never used the term or the word ‘guarantee.”
“All I was doing was showing confidence in my football team because there comes a point, especially here in Philadelphia, where you lose a game or two and everybody feels like everything’s kind of caving in on the football team,” he said, via SI.com.
But the damage was done, and Pederson cannot unring the bell. To Lawrence’s point, his mouth wrote a check that his players — and his players alone — will have to cash.
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Cowboys Mostly Take High Road
As mentioned, nobody within The Star (and least of all head coach Jason Garrett) responded to Pederson with as much veracity as Lawrence. Not that the group is exactly brimming with confidence considering how the last few weeks have gone.
Wide receiver Michael Gallup and cornerback Jourdan Lewis approached the comments in a similar vein — talk all you want, they concede. Their chattering will be done under the primetime lights.
“If you need a coach, or anybody else, to fire you up, I don’t think you really should be playing,” Gallup told reporters, via USA Today’s Jori Epstein. “That’s what Dak [Prescott] says, really every week. We shouldn’t [need] anybody else to motivate us to be fired up. You should already have that. For me, I’m not looking for anybody to fire me up.”
“That’s fine,” Lewis told USA TODAY Sports. “You’ve still got to face an opponent and the results are still uncertain, so that’s definitely something to get his team riled up and ready to play.
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Follow Zack Kelberman on Twitter: @KelbermanNFL