That’s it, folks. No more caveats, qualifications, or sugar-coating. This team sucks. From their patchwork player personnel, their clearly half-assed preparation, and the coaches’ outdated schemes and game-planning to the WTF-are-they-doing?! execution on the field, every aspect of this year’s Dallas Cowboys is bad. I don’t just mean “bad” by the standards of a franchise that has won 36 regular-season games over the last three years. I mean just plain old bad. Like New York Jets/Jacksonville Jaguars bad. Potential-Top-10-pick bad. After Sunday night’s 26-30 loss (another deceptively close score that in no way reflects the reality of the game), this time to a very shaky, injury-depleted San Francisco 49ers, it has become obvious, definitive, and inarguable.
Coming off a bye week that followed the franchise’s worst home loss in three and a half decades — a game that saw the team’s effort and very manhood called into question by fans, the media, and Hall of Fame alumni quarterbacks alike — if ever there was an opportunity for Dallas to try to pull themselves off the proverbial mat, get their scene right, and show the world we’ve been wrong about them, Sunday’s tilt in Santa Clara was as good a shot as they were likely to have. San Fran is one of Dallas’ most hated rivals and has absolutely owned the ’Boys in recent years, winning the last three meetings between the two, including forcing two early playoff exits for the Silver and Blue. So, if you can’t get up for this one, a sea of little blue pills couldn’t help you.
In addition, the Niners seemed ripe for the taking. The Crimson and Gold’s injury woes this year have been well documented, with huge long-term losses on both sides of the ball, including multiple starters and key contributors at wide receiver, D-tackle, O-line, linebacker, safety, and kicker. And that’s not even counting the absence of arguably the best weapon in all of football, last season’s Offensive Player of the Year, running back Christian McCaffrey. The Niners limped into Week 8, dragging a losing record in with them along with a once golden boy at quarterback in Brock Purdy, who, of late, has looked more worthy of the last pick in the NFL draft than he ever has. A better Cowboys team could easily have won this one.
But no. They not only had two weeks to prepare, but they also should have been harboring a little extra juice from putting the entire organization and us fans through a Cersei Lannister shame-walk over the last 14 days. Unfortunately, the Cowboys did what this year’s iteration seems to: They collapsed like the merits of a Fox News talking point when faced with a single molecule of scrutiny.
As has been the case all year long, there’s an AT&T Stadium-sized volume of blame for the awful effort to go around. After a first half in which they appeared to stiffen up and even provide some heretofore-absent physicality, the Dallas defense (aided by some Niners penalty issues) managed to hold San Fran to just six points. (Dallas actually had a lead going into the locker room!) But this would turn into what we’ve seen of the team consistently this year in the third quarter, when Niner tight end George Kittle and his stringy Crypt Keeper hair burst out like a crazed Nordic Viking, leading his team to 21 unanswered points.
Dallas’ offense, toting the league’s worst running game (affected exactly 0% by the debut of Dalvin Cook) continued their impotent ineffectiveness, made all the worse by some completely inexcusable decision-making by QB Dak Prescott, which resulted in his third straight multi-interception game, giving him a total of eight on the year. (He had nine in all of last year’s MVP runner-up season.) Perhaps assisted by some prevent-D looks, Dak and CeeDee Lamb would connect for two touchdowns in the fourth, but the former would throw four straight incompletions in just 22 seconds of game time on their final drive to seal the loss. When it really counted, No. 4 just couldn’t get it done.
It’s this that has been the most frustrating thing to me about the trajectory of this season so far. I expected they wouldn’t be able to run the ball. With the litany of injuries on defense, it’s understandable they would struggle mightily on that side. But I simply could not predict Dak’s piss-poor performance. There is a large contingent of Cowboy fans who have been trying to will into existence a day in which Prescott is no longer under center in Dallas, blaming him (perhaps rightly so) for the club’s lack of postseason success, but I have never been among their number. I’ve been his biggest cheerleader, his most ardent defender, and his stubbornest supporter.
Yet even I must admit that instead of helping elevate a subpar roster to victory despite its shortcomings — which is what you’d expect of a $250M quarterback — he has played perhaps the largest part in their downfall. Yes, the halfbacks couldn’t run through a half-severed spiderweb. Sure, his O-line seems like it’s made of the same silk from a spider’s behind, and his receivers appear to get as much separation as the pages of a rain-soaked newspaper, but he can’t be making it worse by being careless with the ball.
Dak is a snowball quarterback. Whichever way the game starts flowing, his performance reinforces it. If the offense starts humming, he can look like pre-ayahuasca-addled Aaron Rodgers. But when things begin to go poorly, he tends to shrink into the late fourth-round compensatory pick taken as a last resort when a trade up for long-out-of-the-league Paxton Lynch didn’t work out that he is. With the team around him in the state that it’s in, it seems unlikely he’ll often be in a position to play from ahead, and he’s proven again and again he will come up short when playing from behind. So, buckle up, Cowboy fans. We’re just a little over a third of the way through. This season is going to last a lifetime.
