Cowboys day after thoughts from Falcons loss: Finding positives is difficult right now

At a certain point hope exits the conversation. We may have differing opinions on when that inflection point came for the Dallas Cowboys this year. Perhaps it was when it began in a calendar sense and the team lost to the Green Bay Packers in the playoffs. Maybe it was over the offseason that followed when they did very little to help the team. It is possible that it took the constant pot-stirring from the front office and delaying of important extensions that they would inevitably negotiate in the eleventh hour that wore you out.

To be clear, all of those things happened before the season began. Since then the team has played in eight games, lost five of them, and just before the last one created national headlines over the decision (if you want to call it that) to make the third-best running back on the team inactive. They sure are the Dallas Cowboys, if you know what I mean.

Consider that on Monday morning the New Orleans Saints fired head coach Dennis Allen who oversaw a seven-game losing streak from his club. That streak was born literally one week after Allen’s Saints tore this Dallas Cowboys team to pieces and received all sorts of Super Bowl-type love as a result of it.

This is who the Dallas Cowboys slowly and painfully became. and what they are in actuality. They are a weekly point of frustration and are only existing to find the next-most frustrating thing possible to do.

Here are three thoughts about the most recent, most frustrating things that they did when they lost to the Atlanta Falcons.

The Cowboys are starting to act desperate which is never a good sign

This game saw the Cowboys win the coin toss and actually choose to defer which was a high point of fresh air given that they have been insistent on taking the ball to start games as of late. Clearly this disposition has been born out of desperation and a need to build a lead early to hopefully protect, given the struggle to score points and stop other teams from doing so for the large majority of games this season.

As noted though the Cowboys zigged instead of zagging which was great to see. What’s more is that they successfully began the game in that they forced a stop and then turned around and scored points themselves. It was only a field goal, but the process was sound and right and just and legitimate.

This set the team up for the first possession of the second half. It ultimately came with Dallas trailing 14-10 which was certainly a hole, but a moderate one. A false start on the literal first play of the second half made things a bit more tough, but it was just the beginning of the second half when the drive went nowhere and the team had to punt.

The thing is the team did not punt. They ran a fake punt and let Bryan Anger – the punter – throw a pass on 4th and 2. Imagine letting anyone other than the quarterback who your team signed just two months ago to the richest contract in NFL history do this.

Obviously, the play was unsuccessful and the Cowboys turned the ball over. This gave Atlanta the ball at the Dallas 38-yard line and they were in the endzone before anybody knew it, which turned a moderate hole into a legitimate one. It took five plays for the Falcons to turn a four-point lead into an 11-point one and that hole is too big for this team.

Acting carelessly like this is representative of feeling the heat in a number of different ways.

It is impossible to justify legitimate carries for anyone other than Rico Dowdle

All told Rico Dowdle had 12 carries for 75 yards against the Falcons. He also had an incredible receiving touchdown that will be lost in the chaos of this season.

Those numbers put Dowdle north of 6.0 YPC for the game. He is the first Cowboys running back to have at least 6.0 YPC with a minimum of 10 carries since Tony Pollard did it last season on Thanksgiving Day. The player to do it most recently before Pollard then was Dowdle himself.

The point here is not that Dowdle is some serious weapon or one of the best running backs in the NFL, but the idea that literally any other running back on this team should get legitimate carries with Dowdle as an active member of the team is preposterous.

On the subject of active members, this game happened after some high-level drama that could only befall the Dallas Cowboys. It became national news that Ezekiel Elliott would be inactive for the game, that this was a mutual decision (not something that, you know, the head coach could do of their own opinion!) and that there was some element of disciplinary action involved. Total circus type of thing.

Do you know that Dowdle has the most 10+ yard runs of any player on the team this season? Do you know that he has more than half of the total runs of this variety from the team as a whole?

Dowdle has eight runs of 10+ yards this season while the second-biggest contributor is CeeDee Lamb, a wide receiver, with four. Ezekiel Elliott, KaVontae Turpin and Dak Prescott each have one with Prescott’s coming in the same game that we are talking about.

If football truly is a meritocracy then there is no reason that any other running back on this roster should get legitimate carries if the ultimate goal is to win.

This is a different kind of lost season for the Cowboys, one where there is no excuse

When we think about the Dallas Cowboys throughout The Drought™️ it makes some sense to split things into two groups. There was The Time Before in terms of before the discovery of Tony Romo and then there is Everything After with the team having had franchise quarterbacks between him and Dak Prescott. Feel free to argue about who is better or whatever you want, but you get the general point here.

Looking at the Everything After portion of time specifically there have truly only ever been three absolutely lost seasons from this club: 2010, 2015 and 2020. It is not a coincidence that all three of those years involved season-ending injuries to the quarterback and given that the quarterback is the most important person on the team that is somewhat understandable. Completely bottoming out isn’t though, which is why people were so critical of the 2015 group that went 1-11 without Romo under center.

Understanding that these three are in the “lost seasons” box then I would offer a handful other campaigns as Broken But Not Lost: 2008, 2017 and 2019. That first year saw the Cowboys try to do way too much and squander an insanely talented team on paper and the second was the season in which Jerry Jones fought the NFL over and over again to avoid a suspension for Ezekiel Elliott that was ultimately served in the middle of it all.

That last year of 2019 started off so promisingly with the team beginning 3-0, but they withered away and ultimately finally cratered in what was Jason Garrett’s last season in charge.

This season does not feel like any of the six that we have talked about here. The quarterback will miss time with a hamstring injury, but the season was not lost because of that. If we tried, we could compare this group most closely to 2010 when the team was really bad before Romo was injured, so bad that the head coach in Wade Phillips was fired before it all ended. That his firing came immediately after losing to Mike McCarthy’s team in the season that McCarthy would win the Super Bowl in the stadium that the Cowboys play in, where his Cowboys would get broken by the Packers of all teams, is television that network programming cannot write.

Everything feels hard and difficult and frustrating for this team right now and that is extraordinarily unlikely to change right now. This season is uniquely bad in the worst kind of way and there are still more games left of it than we have seen to this point.

Imagine dreading football. That is what has happened around these parts.