NFC Notes: Zack Martin, Darius Slay, Commanders, Cowboys, Eagles

Commanders

Commanders HC Ron Rivera is just as impressed by CB Emmanuel Forbes in practice as he was when the team decided to make him their first-round draft pick.

“He’s a young man that works hard,” Rivera said, via CommandersWire.com. “He’s a very smart, diligent young man when it comes to learning and trying to learn. He’s got tremendous study habits. He does the things that he needs to do to put himself in position, and then when you watch the way he plays, you see how he plays. He practices the way I believe he’s gonna play, and that’s hard and smart.”

“I’m not comparing him to [New York Jets CB] Sauce Gardner, but you know, I know a lot of people expected a lot of things from Sauce,” Rivera added. “Well, sometimes people recognize it real quick, and they don’t throw the balls his way, and then everybody’s gonna know, well, how come he hadn’t got those numbers? So, it’s about how he can impact the game and impact the takeaways.”

Cowboys

Adam Schefter reports that Cowboys G Zack Martin said he is “woefully underpaid relative to the market” and owner Jerry Jones weighed in on Martin’s comments, noting that the team will need to pay LB Micah Parsons in the future.

“It’s not about precedent. It’s about facts,” Jones told ESPN. “We need the money to pay [Micah] Parsons. We need the money to pay the players that we got to pay in the future. It’s a fact. It’s not even a philosophy. It’s just a fact. Those dollars are there and we have this at this level, and if you redid all the contracts, then you never could put a roster together.”

“Not him [only, but] any player, [if] you make an adjustment like that, then all of a sudden you don’t have the money to go pay the guys on their first contract that you need to pay,” Jones continued. “That’s not him. This has nothing to do with him. … I know this: He’s been a credit to everything that we’ve ever done and he’s done. What we haven’t done is we haven’t won a Super Bowl. I want him to get on a team that can win a Super Bowl.”

Martin’s teammates OL Tyler Smith and QB Dak Prescott both believe that the team should pay one of the locker room’s leaders and await his return to the field.

“We’re still in full support of him,” Smith said. “He was just like, ‘Set the tone, I’ll be there soon.'”

“Pay the man,” Prescott simply stated.

• According to Michael Gehlken, Cowboys rookie TE Luke Schoonmaker is dealing with a partial tear to the plantar fascia and is hoping to return to practice in the next week or two.

Eagles

Eagles CB Darius Slay and former Lions HC Matt Patricia certainly had their issues during their time together in Detroit that led to the team trading Slay for less than what he was potentially worth. Many questioned if the two could work together when Patricia joined the Eagles’ coaching staff with Slay noting that the two had a man-to-man conversation about the subject.

“We talked about it during the offseason,” Slay said, via NBCSportsPhiladelphia.com. “They called me, and I was like, ‘It’s cool with me because I want to do what’s best for the organization. I always tell guys, ‘We’re in a rented seat, nobody’s in this seat forever.’ So I said, ‘Y’all got to do what’s best for the organization, and they asked would I be cool with it, and I said yeah. Me and him talked man to man. We’ve got a great understanding. We both want to win, he’s here to help me get better, he wants to get better as a coach, so we’re in good hands right now.”

“It took a lot for both of us to talk, so we did a great job,” Slay added. “We communicate every day, we talk every day, we’re just trying to build everything going forward because at the end of the day, we want to win. That’s his main goal and that’s my main goal, and we’re going to continue to keep building. It’s a great understanding. We both talked it out as grown men. He’s a man, I’m a man, so we just handled it. We respect each other enough to put everything aside and let’s move forward and get better.”