There is nothing redeemable about this utterly atrocious 2020 Dallas Cowboys team.
2020 has been a year from hell for the Dallas Cowboys, as they fall to 2-5 on the season.
The only saving grace for this team is that they play in the worst division in the NFL. Unfortunately, “America’s Team” just lost on the road to the pitiful Washington Football Team in blowout fashion. To make things even worse, backup quarterback Andy Dalton had to leave the game with an injury, yielding way to seventh-round rookie Ben DiNucci. No, it’s not going well.
Who deserves blame for the Cowboys terrible season?
In most circumstances, it’s a bit harsh to be overly critical of a running back for a team not being successful, but the Cowboys are an exception to this. They used the No. 4 overall pick on Ezekiel Elliott out of The Ohio State University back in the 2016 NFL Draft. Though it’s not advantageous to use a pick on a running back that high, Elliott was seen as a transcendent talent coming out.
While he can’t be solely responsible for the team’s nose dive, Dallas needed him to be a bona-fide bell-cow and step up in a major way once starting quarterback and draft classmate Dak Prescott suffered a season-ending injury. Well, what we’ve seen out of Elliott this season is he got a “FEED ME” tattoo on his round belly, has fumbled the football at will and he’s become largely irrelevant.
Look. When a team is trailing oftentimes in football games, you’re not going to be handing the ball off your running back to make up the difference. What is making matters even worse in Dallas is Elliott can’t be trusted to hold onto the football anymore. While he didn’t fumble the football in this laughable loss to Washington, his teammates had a hard time holding onto the rock Sunday.
Though the Cowboys recovered all three of their offensive fumbles, could you even imagine how lopsided the score in Landover, Maryland would have been if Washington recovered at least one or two of them? The reason Elliott deserves some blame for the Cowboys’ inherent ineptitude is he’s one of their very best players, and he’s certainly not playing up to his lofty standard this season.
This is less blame on Dak than a revelation in his absence. It’s also reverse blame because Dak deserves better.
Let’s be clear, no one blames Dak for getting hurt. No one should blame Dak for getting injured. If anything, Dak was a victim of the Cowboys putting such a putrid team around him that he needed to put himself in a situation where he was forced to extend a play in a winnable game and suffer an injury in the process.
Take the injury out of this and that play was a microcosm of the Cowboys season. They needed an incredible comeback to beat a horrible Falcons team and were bleeding points on defense so badly that it forced Dak to try and carry the team on his back.
Dak was having an MVP season and was leading the league in passing at the time of his gruesome injury.
We have to beg the question of how much better things might be if Prescott had not suffered that gruesome injury. Would the Cowboys be all that much better? Perhaps they would have made last Monday’s blowout loss to the Cardinals more competitive than it was, but nothing we’ve seen from Dallas this season implies that Dak was saving them from themselves. Obviously, having a quarterback who is having an MVP season makes you better than you otherwise would be — something we’re seeing now — and the NFC East is the most winnable division in football. Dak absolutely helps the Cowboys win a division title but not even he could carry this team further than the first weekend of the playoffs. For Dak’s sake, the Cowboys have to do better and can’t put him in this same situation again, or he may decide to remove himself from the narrative.
Now, we’re really getting to where the bulk of the blame lies. Though Ezekiel Elliott and Dak Prescott deserve some, it’s only minute slivers of the pie compared to these next three men. At one point in time, he might have been good at his job leading an NFL defense, but it’s become beyond apparent the game has passed Mike Nolan by. His defense is nothing short of rancid.
When he cut his teeth as the Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator, he had all-time players and cerebral ones in Ray Lewis, Ed Reed and Terrell Suggs starring for him. The complexity of his scheme has proven to be offset over time by incredibly instinctive players who created Hall of Fame careers for themselves by making big plays when the opportunities presented themselves.
Flash forward a decade and a half later and the Cowboys continue to not put forth a maximum effort on his side of the ball. When you have players like safety Xavier Woods saying it’s impossible for players to play all-out every snap their on the field, you have a culture problem. This is what substitutions are for. This is why keeping it simple, stupid, is the way to go defensively.
There is talent abundant on this defense. Unfortunately, many of the guys who were paid the big bucks in recent years are mailing it in like an election ballot. Dynamism is non-existent with the Cowboys defense, so it’s easier to fire the defensive coordinator than to get rid of the entire defense itself and start over from scratch. Either way, it’s not acceptable to be playing this badly.
What film did head coach Mike McCarthy watch in his Appleton, Wisconsin barn last year when he was out of football? Did he spend 12 months watching clips of his antiquated passing offense being run during his heyday as the Green Bay Packers head coach in the midst of Aaron Rodgers’ illustrious prime? There is no creativeness offensively in Big D whatsoever, and we told you so.
Allowing offensive coordinator Kellen Moore to serve in this role perhaps three years prematurely has taken a toll on this Dallas offense. At the start of the year, the Cowboys had a trio of triplets it could theoretically count on in quarterback Dak Prescott, running back Ezekiel Elliott, and wide receiver Amari Cooper. Well, Prescott is out for the year and the other two are not electrifying.
Not only do you have those three triplets, but you had two borderline Hall of Famers along the offensive line in Tyron Smith and Zack Martin. Dallas used its first-round pick on CeeDee Lamb out of Oklahoma when there were clearly other issues that needed to be addressed in roster construction. Simply put, Dallas has too much talent on offense to be performing this poorly.
When you have players anonymously calling you and your staff out not even halfway through your first season, you have major, major problems on your hand. We have a feeling a “mutiny” of sorts is coming. What is even worse is Dallas could have hired Kevin Stefanski, Matt Rhule or taken offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy away from the Kansas City Chiefs. They messed up so badly.
The only two times in Jerry Jones’ ownership of the Cowboys have they been consistent, high-end competent and it’s when he’s had a head coach with a big personality who can challenge his massive ego. While all Bill Parcells and Jimmy Johnson are both Hall of Famers alongside their former boss, Jones is the only one regularly losing this unspectacularly every fall Sunday.
Though we should give Jones and his son Stephen Jones some credit for helping assemble what should be a talented roster, at the end of the day it’s coaching that matters most. When you bring in a guy who only went to one Super Bowl on the eliteness of Aaron Rodgers, you’re only setting yourself up to be shamelessly mediocre.
McCarthy is just happy to be here, and it shows.
Jones made a choice that he’d rather be in control than see his team win a championship again. He replaced a clapping patsy in Jason Garrett with a guy who couldn’t win enough that a team without an owner had no choice but to fire him two years ago. Simply put, if you want to take all the credit for your team’s success, then you must be willing to accept all the blame when it is so your fault.
There is no reason to watch the Cowboys play this year unless you are addicted to feeling pain.