Skip Bayless picked his team early. He talked his uncle, a high school football coach, into taking him to a Dallas Cowboys game at the Cotton Bowl, and that day defined his love for the team. Even as he watched the Cowboys lose 31-17 to the St. Louis Cardinals, he was hooked, as Bayless put it decades later. Now, more than six decades on, Bayless is under fire for what he said on air after the Cowboys lost to that same franchise, now the Arizona Cardinals.

The Cowboys’ ugly 33-30 overtime loss to the Cardinals wasn’t the result any fan wanted, but Bayless’ comments afterward got Cowboys players speaking up, most notably Quinnen Williams.

On Nov. 5, Williams responded on X to a clip of Bayless calling him out on air. “@RealSkipBayless it’s extremely crazy to say you wanted players on defense to be executed. You got to do better, my guy.”

The defensive tackle was referring to comments Bayless made on ESPN’s First Take alongside Stephen A. Smith. You’d expect a heated exchange between a diehard Cowboys fan and a diehard Giants fan, but it was Bayless’ response to Williams’ earlier remarks about the team’s failure to execute that drew the spotlight.

“Quinnen Williams, in a five-minute interview, used the word ‘execute’ 32 times in five minutes. And I must tell you that during Sunday’s collapse against the Arizona freakin’ Cardinals, I wanted to execute several of my players during the game. Execute them on the field. I wanted them to be executed.”

Williams had indeed pointed to the team’s lack of execution, rather than the defensive scheme, as the problem. “We got to execute and we haven’t been executing this whole season and we executed for three quarters [against Arizona] and didn’t execute the last quarter and the film saves it all. So I think the biggest thing we got to focus on is execute and continue to stack days. And at the end of the day, we got to execute.”

He wasn’t wrong. The team did fail to execute when it mattered. The Cowboys surrendered a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter and fell to 3-5. But Bayless’ comments didn’t sit right with the defensive tackle.

Williams had a stellar game against the Cardinals, recording two sacks and seven total tackles, his best performance of the season. Yet he watched his team fail to hold the lead at home, resulting in another loss.

More importantly, Williams had already taken responsibility for the defense’s failures.

He pointed out that the first 45 minutes, when the Cowboys were firmly in control, proved the defense wasn’t ineffective. The problem was consistency. The Cardinals’ comeback came in the final 15 minutes, when they forced a tie and sent the game to overtime.

“We’re beating ourselves as a defense,” Williams said bluntly. “We’re the problem. We’re the reason we’re losing these games. If we execute, we can be the reason why we win.”

“I don’t focus on that at all,” Williams added. “I’m a part of this defense. I’m the reason why we’ve given up touchdowns in the fourth quarter. I’m the reason why we haven’t been stopping the run as well. And I got to do better.”

Bayless, however, hasn’t backed down from his criticism of the team. He even took aim at Cowboys Nation for putting up with the team’s performance year after year.

“We gave up 27 points to that [Gardner Minshew, Tyler Allgeier, and the Cardinals] and lost in overtime. And you like the way we’re trending, even though we’ve lost to Arizona now five straight times and nine of the last ten times we played that sorry franchise. You like that? How stupid? How gullible do you think we are? I’m just speaking for me. It’s my fault. It’s our fault but start with me…Because year after year after year, it’s been 31 years since we even sniffed an NFC Championship game. Year after year I say, maybe this is the year.”

As for Williams, he’s already looking ahead. He stressed that the team’s priority before its Week 9 game against the Indianapolis Colts is consistent execution in practices, meetings and, of course, games.