Monday, Doug Pederson basically guaranteed a week seven win in Dallas, then came back a few hours later and said he was not actually guaranteeing a win.

We can split hairs over the verbiage, which seems like a feckless exercise since the real takeaway is whether anything the head ball coach said yesterday actually resonated in the Big D.

The Cowboys didn’t seem to be bothered by the comments, at least not in a way that manifested itself publicly. They’ve lost three straight games and have enough to worry about without taking an opposing coach’s thoughts into consideration.

Said Michael Gallup, via USA Today:

“If you need a coach, or anybody else, to fire you up, I don’t think you really should be playing. That’s what Dak [Prescott] says, really every week. We shouldn’t [need] anybody else to motivate us to be fired up. You should already have that. For me, I’m not looking for anybody to fire me up.”

It’s true. It’s Eagles vs. Cowboys, a divisional game with first place on the line. If you need Doug Pederson’s pseudo-slight to get you pumped up, you’re probably in the wrong head space to begin with.

Here’s Jason Garrett and Jourdan Lewis, via Clarence Hill at the Star-Telegram:

“My response is we’re excited about the challenge,” Garrett said. “Obviously they’re a great football team and we’re going to focus on ourselves and what we need to do to prepare to play our best football on Sunday night.”

“Honestly it doesn’t bother me,” cornerback Jourdan Lewis said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to come out here and try to beat us. He said it publicly? Don’t matter. We already understood there was going to be questions on it but we got to go out there, execute and win this game. Go out there and play this game.”

Will it be bulletin board material?

“We didn’t even discuss it,” Lewis said. “We got to go out there and play. We got to go out there and play with fire. We can’t talk about it anymore. Go out there as a team and be working.”

There you have it. No extra motivation for the Cowboys. They’ve got problems, the Eagles have problems, and somebody is going to be 3-4 by this time next week, which will be incredibly disappointing for that fan base considering that both teams were supposed to be pretty good this year.