Dallas Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones studies the draft picks leading up to their third pick of the NFL Draft in the draft room, Friday, April 26, 2013. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)
IRVING – Dallas Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones is confident in the players and coaches that the franchise is currently employing.
How much confidence does he have?
Well, enough to say on Thursday that the Cowboys currently have a team "that can win a championship."
"I feel like the teams that won championships last year, we could compete with them and we were right there, and I felt like we competed with them even without a full deck," Jones said, referring to the high number of significant injuries suffered by the Cowboys in 2012. "So we have confidence that this team will win a championship."
Of the 12 teams that reached the postseason last year, the Cowboys, who finished 8-8 for the second consecutive season, played five of them. In those six games — two against Washington — Dallas went 1-5, losing to Baltimore (31-29), Seattle (27-7), Washington (twice, 38-31 and 28-18) and Atlanta (19-13). The Cowboys' lone victory came against Cincinnati (20-19).
Jones then pointed to how the three previous Super Bowl winners barely made the playoffs. The Green Bay Packers went 10-6 in 2010, the New York Giants were 9-7 in 2011 and the Baltimore Ravens finished 10-6 last season.
"You're probably not being realistic if you don't think things haven't changed in 10 years," Jones said, "in terms of, there is probably a lot of people who feel like they have a chance to win a championship based on the level playing field and how the cap has affected our game.
"We really feel like we have an opportunity to compete for a championship. We need to stay healthy and we think we have good football players and we think we've improved our team this year. We've put some systems in place that benefit our personnel on both sides of the ball and we have a new special teams coach. We expect to get better there. I think everybody has to get better if we want to win a championship and that's our goal."
Jones spoke after watching all of Thursday's mini camp, which was the final day of over a month of off-season workouts. The team will not work together again until training camp next month in Oxnard, Calif.
Follow Jon Machota on Twitter: @jonmachota
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