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The owner who has a very specific affinity (some call it a fetish) for shoes has no love for the footwear his players wore on Saturday night.

“I’ve had the benefit of the tape, looking at the tape, the evaluation by both scouts as well as the coaches,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, via USA Today. “We frankly had never gotten traction. And I mean that literally. That was a slippery field. If I had to do it over again, we would be really scrutinizing our footwear. Our cleats. We had trouble digging in, so to speak.”

Sounds like an excuse, especially since there were no indications during the game that the Cowboys in L.A. were slip sliding away.

“Well you say, ‘That’s an excuse,'” Jones said. “It is not because not only physically but we had trouble digging in with just the effectiveness of our defense. And we did not stop them, and we did not stop the run.”

Of course, it also becomes harder to stop the run when the alignment of the defensive players reveals via past game film clues about what will happen after the snap, a dynamic that was confirmed by Rams running back C.J. Anderson in a Tuesday visit to the #PFTPM podcast. Anderson’s full interview appears in the video attached to this blurb.