WHERE ARE THEY NOW?  3-4, tied for 2nd, (or 3rd, if you’re a glass half-empty sort), with the way too hungover Eagles.

WHERE SHOULD THEY BE?  That’s probably about where they should be, although they’ve taken an interesting route to get there.   They lost to the Carolina Panthers in Week 1, 16-8.  To call Dallas’s offensive effort in that game ‘inept’ would be an insult to Inspector Clouseau, and the good one, from Peter Sellers, not the crap version Steve Martin did because he apparently made some shitty investments, or just hated Peter Sellers and wanted to shit all over his legacy.  In Week 2 Dallas got past the Giants, 20-13.  Granted, a win is a win is a win is a rose by any other name, but, just to repeat, they beat the godawful New York Giants by 7, and they were at home.  The Giants suck, and Dallas barely squeaked by them.  Again, at home.  Week 3 took them on the road to Seattle, where the Seahawks conspired their way to a 24-13 victory.  Frankly the game wasn’t that close, with Seattle going up 17-6 and then withstanding what could best be termed a “mildly annoyed” comeback by the Cowboys in which the teams exchanged 4th quarter TDs as though they were ill-fitting Xmas sweaters.  The Seahawks are not exactly a ball of fire this year, (3-3, and while they hung tough against the Rams, they lost to the Broncos, one of their wins is against the obviously tanking Raiders, and they beat Arizona by 3), so not exactly a loss one could build on.  Especially with steel beams that can’t withstand jet fuel.

Week 4 gets its own paragraph, because there were some significant developments, and because the last one was getting too long.  Fuck your Manual of Style, nerd.  The Cowboys squeaked by the Lions, 26-24, in a game that they probably should have lost.  Detroit took a one-point lead with a little over two minutes to go, but Dak! responded by driving the Cowboys down the field and Not Dan Bailey kicked a game-winning FG as time expired.  The significant developments noted above included Dallas unleashing Zeke for 150+ yards, for his second productive game in a row, after being something of an afterthought the first two weeks of the season.  The Cowboys were 2-2, and looked to have something to build on.

Naturally, in Week 5, they went out and shit the bed against the Texans, losing 19-16 in a game that they had a chance to win.  The Texans’ D stuffed Zeke, kept Dak to 208 yards and generally exploited what Dallas has been trotting out as an offensive line this year.  The most important development in this game was Jason Garrett failing to go for it on 4th and 1 from the Texans 42.  In OT.  At a time where the next score was going to win the game.  Garrett said he didn’t go for it because it was a “long yard”, but lots of people were critical of him, (rightly so IMO), and one of them was Ol’ Double J, and I have a feeling that this season might be the last one for the Garrett.

I went into Week 6 expecting a good old fashioned curb-stomping, and that’s what I got.  Of course, I expected the Jaguars to curb stomp the Cowboys, and instead Dallas took Jacksonville out behind the woodshed and administered a 40-7 thrashing.  I’m still not sure exaclty what happened, other than that Blake Bortles became bothersomely burdensome and befuddled, and has since become benched, and that Jacksonville may not be the team we thought they were at the beginning of the year, especially with Fournette having an owie on his hamstring.  And Bortles is just terrible.

As was the case going into Week 5, I thought that the victory over Jacksonville would carry over to the bye because A) I thought the Cowboys had a bye in Week 6, and B), when I found out they had a game, it was only the Redacteds, so that’s pretty much the same thing, right?

Wrong.

The Redacteds “beat” the Cowboys 20-17 in a game marred by controversy when the Cowboys got screwed on a late, and bad, call on their long-snapper for fiddling with the ball on a 43 yard FG attempt that would have tied the game.  The FG became a 52 yard attempt, and it doinked off the goal post.  It would have been good from 47, and really good from 42, where it should have been taken from because Washington was actually off-sides.  The loss doesn’t bother me so much as does the fact that I agreed with Skip Bayless about the call.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to wash that feeling off my skin short of bathing with raw lye.

So yeah, the Cowboys should probably be 3-4, or maybe 4-3, but they beat some teams they should have lost to and lost some games they could have won.

ANY SURPRISES?  Glad you asked! (you didn’t)

1.  The Dallas defense has been surprisingly not shitty.  The Vander Esch kid looks like the real deal at LB, the Jaylon Smith gamble from a couple of years ago seems to have paid off and it’s Week 7 and Sean Lee isn’t dead!  No one on the front line has been suspended and DeMarcus Lawrence is again playing as though his contract depends on it, which it very much does, as I believe he’s on a one year deal.  Even the secondary seems to be mostly holding up its end of the bargain, which is a nice change.

e)  Dak! has shown flashes of being a better-than-competent NFL QB.  In fact, if he were not held back by what seems to be an increasingly patchwork O-line, I think he’d be poised for a break out year.

4/10)Zeke hasn’t hit anyone he wasn’t supposed to.

WHAT SUCKS? 

G)The receiving corps is, (was?), ass.  I read somewhere recently that the entire group has one, (1), 100 yard game between them, and that was Beasley.  The TEs might be worse at tight-ending than Jason Witten is at announcing.  The fact that Prescott has done as well as he has with these paddle-handed idiots is frankly miraculous.

42)Jason Garrett continues to stumble his way to a paycheck, week in and week out, smiling blankly the entire time, while never showing any sort of initiative or originality.  As noted above his failure to press for 1 yard in an OT game may have sealed his fate with JJ, and if so, good riddance.  He’s a shit coach who has long overshot his talent.  Enjoy coaching at some jerkwater D-II school Jason, it’s the level you were meant for.

<>)I’m not willing to say the O-line sucks, because it’s had some good games, but it’s not what it was, and against the Texans and Washington they showed some New York Giants level of terrible.  The younger, healthier guys may start to gel with the veterans, or some veterans may get healthy, but as it is right now the O-line is not the strength it was.

666)Jerry Jones still owns the team.

\|)Next year’s draft.  As you may have heard, the Cowboys traded their first round pick in 2019 to the Raiders for Amari Cooper this week.  I liked Cooper two years ago, but his production has declined significantly in the last two years and he got knocked out of his last game with a concussion, so I’m not sure that picking him up was the best use of a #1 pick.  Even with the concussion, however, he’s pretty much instantly the best WR the Cowboys have, so there’s that.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?  There’s 9 more weeks left.  The NFC East is a dumpster fire this year.  The Cowboys are 3-0 at home and 0-4 on the road.  I say they split with the Eagles, beat the Redacteds in Dallas and beat the Giants in New York, only because that’s the last game of the season and the Giants will have long since given up any pretense of trying to do anything other than take the 1st pick in 2019 away from the Raiders.  That puts the Cowboys at 6-5.  Out of conference games are the Titans at home, (W)*, Atlanta on the road, (L), Saints at home, (L), Colts on the road, (W), and Buccaneers on the road, (W*, only because I hate Rapey Winston).  Which takes the Cowboys to 9-7.  They’ll either win the NFC East (and then lose their first play-off game in very convincing fashion), with that or come up just short of either Washington or Philadelphia, (if the latter can get their heads out of their asses), and miss the play-offs completely.

Meh.

*I can easily see Dallas dropping both of these games, bringing them to 7-9.  And they could still win the NFC East.