Late into the night on Sunday, the sea of discontent was washing over the Dallas Cowboys.
They’d suffered a somewhat embarrassing 28-25 loss to the Baltimore Ravens at home, in a game that wasn’t really much of a fight until the final half of the fourth quarter. The defense had been flattened for an absurd 274 rushing yards. The offense had been largely toothless most of the night, undermined by a scheme that is struggling to find balance between an atrophied running game and inconsistent passing attack. All bonded together by a cast of players who appear to have lost interest in masking their frustrations.
You could see it in the face of quarterback Dak Prescott, who was captured on video side-eyeing reporters as he walked to the Cowboys’ locker room — declaring to seemingly everyone in earshot, “Jump off if you want. Please. Please, please, please.”
You could also see it in the disappearance of wideout CeeDee Lamb, who absence in the locker room was noted by multiple reporters on social media. Later, you could hear it in the voice of head coach Mike McCarthy, who navigated his way through clichés about Dallas needing to look “straight into the mirror,” being “a work in progress”, and needing “to clean our own house.” Right about that time, McCarthy’s predecessor with the Cowboys, former head coach Jason Garrett, was wielding a sharper edge on the pregame show of NBC’s Sunday Night Football, doling out eyebrow-raising criticism that effectively labeled Dallas as being soft.
“Everybody understands this about the Cowboys now,” Garrett said. “They’re not a physical football team — we have to go in there and run the ball. The last two years they were dominant at home. [But] I think teams have found a formula. Run the ball, get ahead. That’s what silences that pass rush. The Ravens controlled most of the ballgame because they handed the ball off [and] dominated the line of scrimmage.”
This is not a chaotic rough patch the Cowboys saw coming. Not after anchoring the offense with monster contract extensions for Prescott and Lamb. Not after replacing departed defensive coordinator Dan Quinn with team ownership-favored Mike Zimmer. And certainly not after Dallas beat the brakes off a talented Cleveland Browns team 33-17 on the road in week one, then heading back to the friendly confines of AT&T Stadium for Weeks 2 and 3.
But here the Cowboys are, sputtering at 1-2 after back-to-back home defeats to the New Orleans Saints and Ravens — destroyed by opposing running games in both losses, while being simultaneously frustrated by their own offensive mistakes and inconsistencies. The latter of which got so bad against the Ravens that Fox’s Tom Brady dropped his manicured broadcasting facade for a moment following a Dallas false start in the third quarter, lamenting in a disgusted tone, “Another penalty. Oh my god.”
He might as well have been speaking for most (if not all) of the Cowboys fan base, which was nothing short of apoplectic on social media for the majority of Sunday’s loss.
Maybe the lone silver lining for Dallas was that failing to pull off a miraculous comeback late in the fourth quarter guaranteed this loss won’t be glossed over. Instead, it will be focused through how Dallas got here, with a soft defensive underbelly that can’t stop opposing running games — not to mention an offense that feels more predicated on finesse than ever (and prone to falling out of balance when it’s trailing in games). That was all exposed again for a second straight week, when Ravens running back Derrick Henry pounded Dallas’ defense for 151 yards and two touchdowns.
Henry was flanked by quarterback Lamar Jackson, who threw for 182 yards and ran for another 87, while collecting both a passing and rushing touchdown. Jackson also helped ice the Cowboys on Baltimore’s final drive, throwing and rushing for a two key first downs that ended the game. Along the way, Jackson was never sacked and rarely under significant pressure.
It showcased real problems with the Cowboys. Some of this is extension-related cap issues. Some of it is scheme. Some of it is player-driven. Some of it is financial stubbornness and a lack of creativity. All of it, in some sense, can be traced to ownership mistakes that happened long ago (like the failures to do the Lamb and Prescott extensions earlier) or more recently (cutting financial corners at running back). Sprinkle in draft picks that haven’t contributed the way Dallas hoped (see the majority of the 2023 class) and there’s a reason why certain parts of the depth chart feel thin and troubling. And all of this is even before we get to the fit between Zimmer’s system and the players carrying it out.
I want to be careful not to drop the hammer on that last point, because it’s still early and fixable coordinator kinks can sometime linger into the middle of the season before everything comes together. But clearly, the defensive front is now a massive red flag for Dallas, with the front seven looking completely out of sorts in back-to-back weeks that saw the Cowboys give up a combined 464 rushing yards and six touchdowns. While it’s not exactly the Mike Nolan-era panic attack, there is definitely something odd going on inside the scheme. That much was made obvious by DeMarcus Lawrence, who told reporters there was too much “hero ball” being played, to which Micah Parsons echoed that players need to do their jobs. At one point Sunday, Lawrence and Parsons were seen having an animated discussion on the sideline, too.
These aren’t the kinds of things that get brought up when a scheme and its personnel are functioning correctly. Nor are they an issue when the stars in a defensive unit are able to cover up for soft spots. Neither Lawrence or Parsons have been able to do that for two straight games. If that continues in Thursday’s road game against the New York Giants, you can bet everything about those defensive issues is going to get amplified significantly.
Sunday night, owner Jerry Jones said it wasn’t a personnel problem. Or a coaching problem. Or even a spending problem — which he defended after getting pressed about not courting Henry prior to his signing with the Ravens. Instead, Jones passed it all off as merely things that need to be worked into shape. He cast it all as solvable problems. But make no mistake, they are Jerry’s problems. And if they aren’t resolved soon, that’s what everyone will be focusing on in a season that can slip away as quickly as the joy of that Week 1 win.