The Cowboys rookie shining in Ezekiel Elliott’s absence
The Cowboys, at least outwardly, aren’t missing Ezekiel Elliott.
With their star running back holding out of training camp, fourth-round pick Tony Pollard is drawing eyeballs and getting rave reviews instead. The latest in this standoff seems to be that the Cowboys are claiming happiness with what they’ve got in the rookie — mitigating the need to capitulate to Elliott.
“Pollard really showed the ability to plant quick, plant his feet and his quick feet,” Jerry Jones told reporters in Oxnard after a scrimmage. “He is obviously about as smooth an athlete and certainly a running back. You saw the flexibility.
“If he gets better and better and better, which he’s got to, I think you are going to see a guy who plays early for the Cowboys.”
Dallas also likes Mike Weber, its seventh-round pick, who could play alongside Pollard in two-back packages should Elliott miss games.
Despite holding out, Elliott is keeping tabs on Cowboys camp. When the team posted video of Weber busting a run for a touchdown on Sunday, Elliott issued a quote-tweet featuring emojis of a face with steam coming out of its nose.
At Memphis last season, Pollard had just 117 touches but went for 1,010 yards, averaging 7.1 per rush and 11.7 per reception.
“Coming out of school, he was just a football player,” head coach Jason Garrett told reporters. “You saw it on tape, you saw him inside, you saw him outside, you saw him return kicks. He did a lot of different things.
“With all the young players, you try to expose them to different parts of your team. … At some point with those guys you say, ‘OK, let’s focus more on this and less on this.’ But he’s a young player and we need to find out about him and how he can handle all these different situations.”
The praise, in part, a way of leveraging Elliott. But quarterback Dak Prescott also called Pollard “one of the most exciting players, to me, of this training camp.”
A training camp that goes on for now without Elliott.
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