Terrance Williams brushes off social media backlash

Terrance Williams became social media’s whipping boy after the Dallas Cowboys’ season-opening loss to the New York Giants on Sunday.

Williams had a late-game blunder by staying inbounds on the final play instead of getting out of bounds, which would have stopped the clock, giving kicker Dan Bailey enough time for a 60-plus yard field goal attempt to win the game.

Coach Jason Garrett and Williams acknowledged he should have gone out of bounds, and Williams received much ridicule from fans. But Williams is moving past it.

“I know what I did and y’all know what I did,” Williams said Wednesday. “It’s just something that you have to man up and say you messed up. That’s what I’m doing.

“It really doesn’t bother me that people talk about me because they basically always find something to talk about me for. So that really don’t even bother me, it comes with the job.”

Williams said it is nice that teammates such as Jason Witten, Brandon Carr and Sean Lee have come to his defense, and nobody within the organization is putting too much blame on him.

Williams has learned to deal with scrutiny, too, since joining the Cowboys as a 2013 third-round pick out of Baylor.

Williams, for instance, has been dogged by questions about his inability to step up as a No. 1 receiver when Dez Bryant has been injured in recent years. He’s also gone through stretches where he doesn’t have a catch.

“It just comes with the job and I just learned to block people out,” said Williams, who finished with three catches for 34 yards in the season opener. “It doesn’t matter to me. They’re not in here. They don’t know what kind of person I am; they don’t know how hard I work.

“It’s just one of those things, if you want to blame me, fine, but at the end of the day, I’m still here; I’m still doing my job. If you feel like you can come take it, come take it.”

Targeting Dez

Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott’s debut would have had a much different tone if one of several plays had gone his way in the season-opening 20-19 loss. Instead, Prescott was left answering questions Wednesday about what went wrong, namely Dez Bryant finishing with only one catch for eight yards.

“That’s our guy; he needs catches; he needs balls,” Prescott said. “He had some balls thrown at him. He wants to bring down, and he’d say it himself, he wants to bring that touchdown down, make that play. If he has that, regardless of two catches or not, he has a touchdown, and I don’t know if we’re still talking about this.

“I’m going to continue to run our offense. If Dez is the read, Dez is the read.”

The Cowboys run a democratic approach on offense under Garrett and offensive coordinator Scott Linehan. The quarterback is supposed to find the open receiver, whether it’s an All-Pro such as Bryant or a second-year tight end such as Geoff Swaim.

The Cowboys rarely run designed plays specifically for Bryant, and operate under the mindset that balls will eventually work their way toward, “the stars.” That has worked in the past, but people are questioning that philosophy after a game in which Bryant was a relative non-factor.

“I know some people kind of threaten and you’ve got to try to get some of your playmakers the ball, but then you get away from your offense,” Prescott said. “You get away from things that you normally do when you do that. So I think it’s important for us to just make sure that we keep running our offense.”

Gregory at work

Garrett said he has had brief conversations with Randy Gregory since the defensive end rejoined the team earlier this week. The Cowboys moved Gregory from the reserve/did not report list to the reserve/suspended list on Monday.

Garrett said Gregory is “doing a lot better” after spending time at a rehab clinic.

“Talk about everything,” Garrett said of the conversations with Gregory. “You try to get to know your players as people and then certainly we’re football coaches so we always talk about football and how they’re doing physically and what their role’s going to be going forward.”

This story was originally published September 14, 2016 at 8:06 PM with the headline "Terrance Williams brushes off social media backlash."