3 Cowboys to blame for embarrassing loss to lowly Cardinals

Cowboys to blame for Cardinals loss, No. 1: The Back Seven

When Trevon Diggs tore his ACL in practice leading into Week 3, there were people who surmised that the pass defense could take a step back. And admittedly, Dallas did commit some costly errors in coverage in this game. However, the back seven is taking blame here not just for their work in the passing game, but for their complete haplessness against the run.

The Cowboys gave up 7.5 yards per play in this game. Credit to Arizona, they did an overall solid job of keeping Micah Parsons and Demarcus Lawrence at least somewhat limited. But on top of that, the group behind the defensive front was caught out of possession or fooled consistently. That's why Josh Dobbs averaged 7.7 yards per pass (dwarfing Dallas' own average of 5.5) and also averaged 7.4 yards per carry.

In fact, the Dallas defense gave up 184 rushing yards in the first half of this game to the Cardinals. That was the most that a Cowboys defense has given up in one half in over 30 years, since 1991 to be exact. That's pretty emblematic of the effort that we saw on the field in Arizona.

For a group that was deservedly getting tons of flowers for their performance over the first two weeks of the 2023 season, they didn't deliver against an offense playing without Kyler Murray, without any top-tier playmakers, and with an average-at-best offensive line. That's not going to get it done and that was a poor, poor effort from the back seven both in coverage and against the run.