Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones is well aware that the offseason is the time of year that, in the past, Dez Bryant has found himself in trouble. But he believes the young receiver has turned over a new leaf since this time last year.
“Dez is in a better place relative to anything that the Cowboys are interested in, which is most everything about him,” Jones said, per ESPN Dallas. “He’s in a better place and that’s a positive. ... He’s not around the kind of atmosphere or doesn’t have the kind of risks that are involved in his life on or off the field that he had seven, eight months ago.”
Many believe the evidence of Bryant’s transformation started to crop up long before the season came to an end. He posted 92 catches for 1,382 yards and 12 touchdowns in 2012, and won a good deal of skeptical fans over by playing through a potentially season-ending finger fracture. Bryant has since had surgery on the finger.
"There’s a correlation in the growth and development as a person and the growth and development of the player," head coach Jason Garrett adds. "I think what he’s done more than anything else is just simply mature and it has a lot to do with the approach that he’s taken. I think the first couple of years in the league, he was a very productive player for a rookie receiver and a second-year receiver, he made big impacts on games, but he wasn’t as consistent as he needed to be. I think his practice habits, his commitment to getting better on the details of the game just continued to improve. I think he saw the results on how that led to him having success on Sunday afternoons.”
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