4 Dallas Cowboys to blame for total embarrassment at hands of Saints

All of the good feelings that the Dallas Cowboys had after Week 1 were quickly thrown away on Sunday in Week 2 at AT&T Stadium. The New Orleans Saints trotted into Arlington and just dog-walked Mike McCarthy's team up and down the field on both sides of the ball for 60 minutes.

The game ended with a 44-19 win for the Saints but, in all honesty, it felt even worse than that for the Cowboys. This team was hapless and quite quickly looked hopeless as they provided precisely zero answers for anything the Saints were throwing at them. Dallas went from looking like a contender to looking like an abject embarrassment.

After a game like that, someone needs to be blamed. Specifically, these four Cowboys need to be blamed for what is one of the worst Dallas regular season games in recent memory.

4. Ezekiel Elliott is a massive waste of time on the Cowboys

We're not reinventing the wheel here, but the reunion with Ezekiel Elliott was a bad idea from the jump and it's only looking worse day-by-day and snap-by-snap when he lines up with this offense. He played the majority of the running back snaps in this game and, outside of his pass-blocking, he simply looks useless and lifeless in this offense.

Elliott finished the game with a measly six carries for an even more measly 16 yards while also catching two passes for 16 yards. Outside of his long play of the day, a 15-yard catch-and-run for a first down — wherein he had a hole that you or I could've gotten that type of gain — Zeke was a net negative on offense. His explosiveness is long since gone and he looks like he's moving in hardening cement out there.

Not investing in the running back position is one thing. Investing, even relatively inexpensively, in a washed-up former fan-favorite is worse than that. And that's quite clearly what the Cowboys have done in the case of Elliott.

3. Trevon Diggs didn't play anything close to like a superstar

Trevon Diggs returning to the Cowboys after missing all of last season was supposed to be a boon for Dallas. He had been a Defensive Player of the Year candidate previously and, especially after the DaRon Bland injury, this team needed him to step up and be that again if they were going to continue their impressive defensive run.

On Sunday, Diggs was anything but impressive. His normal style of play that can get him caught gambling was exacerbated facing the motion of the Saints offense and he was burned quite often throughout the game. That's kind of the trade-off you take with Diggs, to some degree, but what made it exponentially worse was that the veteran corner wasn't defending willingly or capably against the run, making him doubly a liability for this defense.

Diggs is being paid to be a superstar. That's easy to buy into when he's coming up with interceptions and paying off his gambles. It's much harder to justify when he's putting forth effort like this while getting burned in coverage.

2. Mike Zimmer saw his lunch get eaten by Klint Kubiak

Throughout his career, we've seen Mike Zimmer struggle when it comes to facing offenses that have branched off of the Shanahan tree. But hey, with the likes of Micah Parsons and a talented unit he's armed with in the Cowboys defense, maybe that would change on Sunday!

Nope. Not even close.

Klint Kubiak, who previously worked with Zimmer in Minnesota, walked circles around Zimmer in this game. The Saints scoring a touchdown on their first six drives of this game, which put the game completely out of reach at that point, is fully indicative of what we saw. There were free runners, massive running lanes, and just general easy chunk gains throughout the parts of the game that mattered.

This isn't to say Zimmer was an outright awful hire, though it is one I questioned as a veteran retread with seemingly little upside. This was as bad as it could possibly be, though, a defensive coordinator against his worst-case scenario matchup and having no resistence to offer.

1. Jerry Jones is the biggest culprit for Cowboys embarrassment

Drink, rinse, give Jerry Jones the blame he deserves, repeat.

There have been plenty of notable and worth-mentioning shortcomings when it comes to Jones and the Cowboys brass but this felt like the most egregious possible example of everything that the front office failed to do this offseason. You could start with hiring a retread like Mike Zimmer to replace Dan Quinn, a move that could have upside some days but also had a high possibility of failure based on recent history.

The bigger issues, however, were with the personnel. It was painfully apparent that the Cowboys needed more playmakers on offense outside of CeeDee Lamb and Dak Prescott. None were added. So when Lamb was blanketed by double coverage in this game, Prescott was left with nowhere reliable to turn and it showed, and that includes even being able to rely on the run game.

Jones has been an active detriment to this franchise for years now but it's rare that we see it all take shape on the field like we did in Week 2. If we're pointing fingers, though, point them first at the owner's box for what we had to sit through.