The Sports Xchange

IRVING, Tex. – Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett is taking his team to New York one day early so they can visit Ground Zero, the September 11 Memorial Museum and have dinner at One World Observatory.

“It’ll be great to expose our team, particularly because of their age,” Garrett said. “A lot of them were young when this happened. So I think the exposure to it — the tragedy of what it was and then the response from everybody in that area and all across our country — I think it’s significant to our country’s history and inspirational to everybody. I think it’ll be a really special evening for our team.”

Garrett got the idea when he made a trip to Ground Zero with his wife, Brill, over the summer.

“I probably wasn’t there for 10 minutes and I kind of looked around and said ‘We’ve got to somehow, some way get our football team here,'” Garrett said.

–The bye week came at a good time for quarterback Matt Cassel, who had his fourth child on Saturday.

He initially worried that it might conflict with his start against the Giants on Sunday. But the baby came a week early. His wife has even been generous enough to let him cram for the Giants game and not make him get up for 2 a.m. feedings.

“I kind of slept in the room the other night to get some rest,” Cassel said with a smile Wednesday. “I wonder how long that’s going to last before she brings me in and makes me do the bottle feeding. But she’s great about it.”

–Defensive end Greg Hardy has a plan for Giants quarterback Eli Manning on Sunday. “Hit him in the mouth. That’s how you disrupt a quarterback,” Hardy said.

“The best thing is to make a quarterback feel pain. You want to be respectful of the rules of the game and you don’t want to hurt anybody, but to make him feel you is to bring his eyes down on you. You don’t want a good quarterback like Eli Manning looking down the field. Ever.”

–Defensive end Randy Gregory practiced Wednesday and should be good to go for Sunday’s game against the Giants after missing the last four games with a high ankle sprain.

“Mentally I think I’m still trying to get past that point where I can trust it enough to plant on it and everything like that,” Gregory said. “But that’s what I had last week and this week, practice, full pads, hopefully my confidence will get a little bit of a boost there.

“If I come out a little rusty, that’s kind of expected I guess in some ways. But I definitely fully expect to come out there and pick up where I left off.”

–Wide receiver Dez Bryant did not practice on Wednesday and if he doesn’t get on the field Thursday its unlikely he will play against the Giants on Sunday. Bryant has been out since the season opener with a fractured bone in his foot, but had hoped to return for Sunday’s game against the Giants. He had surgery, which included a bone graft, on Sept. 14, the day after he broke his right foot in the season-opening win against the Giants. Two weeks ago he had a stem-cell injection in the foot to help the healing process.

“I think it’s as simple as, ‘Is he ready to play physically?'” head coach Jason Garrett said. “There’s a lot of different ways to evaluate that. He obviously is the one who will have the biggest say in it based on how he’s feeling with the work that we’re giving him. But we’ll observe him as well. We’ll observe him as coaches. We’ll observe him as medical people. And just see where he is and we’ll make our best judgment for him and for our team.”

–Running back Joseph Randle is averaging just under 15 carries and 57.8 yards per game this season. He has also scored four touchdowns. Randle remains the starter, but he will lose carries and reps to running back Christine Michael starting Sunday against the Giants as the Cowboys hope a changeup will boost their struggling running game.

“I just want to make sure that I’m out there every opportunity I get, whether they’re throwing it to me or handing me the ball that I’m trying to make sure that I’m running the ball and doing the best things I can do to help the team win,” Randle said. “As far as all the other stuff goes, that’s out of my control. I’m not going to worry about nothing that I can’t control.

“I just want to be somebody good around the locker room that’s not always mad about this and mad about that, making sure that I’m not a cancer in this locker room. So I’m not going to be the one complaining for carries and all this different stuff like that. That’s not how I’m going to play.”