Not Great Bob! The Dallas Cowboys At The Bye

The Dallas Cowboys staggered into the bye at 3-3.  Their wins came against a physically bad and morally bankrupt Cleveland Browns, a just-plain bad New York Football Giants team, and somehow overcame Mike Tomlin’s Voodoo to beat the Steelers of Pittsburgh.  The latter two wins were struggles.

The losses came at the hands of the New Orleans Saints, (a blow-out at 44-19), and a squeaker against the Ravens, although I seem to recall that the final score was a smidge closer than the actual game.  I could be wrong; I’m having a harder time than usual following the NFL, and the Yankees are in the World Series.  The Cowboys prepared for the bye by…taking the week before it off and getting the absolute snot beat out of them, 47-9, in Dallas, by the knee-cap biting Lions of Detroit.

To be fair

The Dallas defense is missing two key players, DeMarcus Lawrence being on IR with a foot owie and all-around monster Micah Parsons having missed three weeks with a high ankle sprain.  I would not expect any team to lose two players of that quality and not take a hit, and Dallas is certainly not doing anything to change that expectation.

Offensively, however, Dallas really doesn’t have those excuses.  They’re pretty health, (yes, Brandin Cooks is out, but the offense was never running through Cooks, and I know because he was on my FF team when he was healthy and hoo boy did the offense not run through him), they’re just…bad.

For starters, the answer at RB when Troy Pollard left was not “don’t pursue Derrick Henry; instead resign Zeke and have him back up Rico Dowdell or some other guy, I don’t know, whatever” which is the conversation I imagine Jerry and Stephen Jones having right before they went over to Craig James’s house and didn’t kill a hooker.  Because the running game has been bad.

The offensive line has been bad.  I don’t know enough about playing football to know why, but I do know enough that if, every other snap in any game I watch, it looks like some Dutch kid forgot to stick his finger in the dike and now the North Sea’s in the backfield, (somehow Balls is going to win an AVN off the movie he writes from this sentence), the offensive line is not doing his job.

Dak, of course, got paid just before the season started, as did Cee Dee Lamb.  Good for both of them:  football is a brutal game, (just ask Adrian Hutchinson), and any time a player can make himself a pile of guaranteed money they absolutely should.  What they shouldn’t do is then go out and, well, suck, and provide more highlights bickering on the sidelines than they are on the field.  That, however, seems to be the path chosen during the first six weeks.  It has not produced the desired results.

I assume, anyway.  I don’t really know what results they were going for with those instances.  Maybe this is their plan and I just can’t see it.  I’m just a stupid fan, and as gaslighter-in-chief Jerry Jones would have you know, us fans don’t know what we’re talking about.

There’s no relevant reason for this picture, I just thought we could use a hand, (see what I did there?  Oh, like you’re so funny) getting through this dreary slog through the first six weeks of Dallas Cowboy football.

There are two good things this season for the Cowboys.  One of them, unfortunately, is that their field goal kicker is really good, but that’s probably because he gets way more in-game practice at it than he should.  The second is that people are starting to get tired of Ol’ Double J’s bullshit and he’s getting publicly called out on it.  And he hates it.  “Where are you gonna go to get any players?”  Gee, I dunno, Jerry.  I mean, the Jets went to Vegas and got a WR.  The Ravens went to the bank and got a RB.  The Bills went to Cleveland for God’s sake and got a WR that you used to have!!!. Those are some places that you could have gone to, but did not.

As for the coaching?  Meh, I don’t know.  The defense obviously misses Dan Quinn, but they probably miss Parsons and Lawrence just as much if not more.  Mike McCarthy isn’t getting it done calling the plays, but I don’t know how much of that is on him and how much is on Jones & Son not getting him any players not named Dak or Cee Dee.  I do know that the Cowboys are averaging just under 8 penalties a game, which to me seems high, and is consistent with Dallas generally having been an undisciplined and underachieving mess under McCarthy.

The little I’ve seen of Dallas this season I’m surprised they’re 3-3 and not 2-4.  The Steelers really should have beaten them, but apparently Joubou took the night off, or the rum was not to his liking.  Upgrade your rum game, Tomlin!

Dallas comes off the bye and gets San Francisco on the road, which is hardly the first time a bi need up in San Francisco, but I digress.  That’s 3-4 right there.  The next four games are Falcons, Eagles, another bye week with something called ‘The Texans’ penciled in for some reason, and Washington.  Dallas could drop all four of those, and will if they keep playing the way they have been.  If Parsons comes back, and if Dak and Cee Dee use the bye to get reacquainted with how they used to not suck together, they could go 3-1.  Call it 2-2 for our purposes here.  Then it’s Giants-Bengals-Panthers, and that could be 3-0 and will be no worse than 2-1.  Then Dallas finishes either 0-3 or 1-2 against MRSA Ray, Philly, and the Washington Football Team.  So best case for Dallas seems to be 9-8, (which probably somehow gets them into a Wild Card position), against a worst case of 6-11.  I’ll split the difference and call it 7-9-1.

Not great, Bob.