Jones: McCarthy hasn't lost Cowboys' locker room

Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones isn't sold on the notion that his players don't believe in Mike McCarthy following another defeat Monday night.

"That losing the team stuff, that's so overblown," Jones said after Dallas' 34-10 loss to the Houston Texans, per Todd Archer of ESPN.

"These guys are so - first of all, they're natural competitors. ... They're so proud of the fact that they are professional and disappointed in maybe the way they executed the play, but that's not anything that's brother or first cousin to give up."

He added: "Everybody's certainly disappointed, but that's a big difference in not knowing that you got to put the foot in front of the other to go."

Dallas kept things close in the first half, going into the third quarter down 17-10. However, quarterback Cooper Rush was strip-sacked with just under 13 minutes remaining in the contest, leading to a Texans scoop-and-score.

Rush completed 32 passes in the contest for 354 yards with one touchdown and one interception. The Cowboys failed to rush for 100-plus yards for the seventh game this season.

Dallas has lost five straight contests, its longest losing skid since 2015. The Cowboys became the first team in NFL history to trail by at least 20 points in six consecutive home games, dating back to last season's wild-card defeat to the Green Bay Packers.

"I think it's very frustrating," McCarthy said Monday. "It's frustrating for everybody. Frustrating for the players, frustrating for the coaches. I know it's disappointing for the fans.

"But we just - we have a lot of moving parts going on, and we just have to be cleaner and more detailed in certain spots. We're not playing well enough, not executing well enough, coaching well enough to overcome some of the mistakes we're making in critical times of the game."

McCarthy, 61, is in the final year of his contract. His worst year as a head coach came in 2018 when he went 4-7-1 before being fired by the Packers. He went 42-25 in four seasons as Dallas' coach heading into this campaign.