When I think of the Cowboys of the last 10 years, I don’t think of a team that’s good, though they have sometimes been quite good. I don’t think of a team that’s bad, either. I think of a team that’s entertaining. I think of a team that’s bold.
The Cowboys don’t make NFC Championship games, but they make you believe that they could make NFC Championship games if everything comes together. They have huge draft hits and enormous draft misses. And along the way, because they are America’s Team, they’re an unavoidable story. Whether it’s Tony Romo’s inability to get it done in the clutch or Dak Prescott’s inability to get it done in the clutch, the Cowboys have been a good enough product to force a debate into your eyeballs and eardrums. They’re a walking First Take topic.
But with Jerry Jones’ admission that his team won’t be trade deadline buyers and the implication that there’s not a lot to sell, the Cowboys have entered an awkward space known mostly to fans of teams like the Tennessee Titans. They might have enough on hand to make the playoffs if a few breaks go their way, but there’s no debate at this point that there’s not enough on hand to win multiple playoff games. The Cowboys are 3-3 with a minus 42-point differential that suggests they’re more of a 2-4 team. The teams lurking around them in FTN’s DVOA rankings, where the Cowboys sit 24th, are the Cardinals, Giants, Rams, and Titans. They are the only team in the bottom 10 in DVOA that is .500.
The offense around Prescott and CeeDee Lamb has hollowed out, leaving young players who need to take leaps to be productive starters and old players who are nearing the end of the line. The defense is in shambles under Mike Zimmer’s watch. They have building blocks in Micah Parsons, Trevon Diggs, and DaRon Bland, but Parsons isn’t signed long-term, Diggs has underperformed this year, and Bland hasn’t played a game after suffering a stress fracture in his foot during training camp.
The Cowboys are not dealing with the typical Cowboys problems of ill-timed poor coaching to throw a playoff game; they’re dealing with Jaguars problems. They have not supplemented the core with either real talent to grow it or a real supporting cast. The only three players they’ve drafted in the past three years that I’m sure are NFL starters are Bland, Tyler Smith, and Jake Ferguson. The Cowboys won’t ever be anonymous, because even the Quincy Carter Cowboys weren’t anonymous. They’ll be in your face every 3:30 window and primetime game they can possibly get. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be fun to watch.
So what does that mean for the rest of the season? Jones taking the tack that he’d rather not start making moves to improve the roster is fair. I’d personally advocate for shedding older players for draft picks, because even a successful soft reset would help a lot. (Jerry would then tell me that he’s going to have me fired and the magazine shut down.) But if he won’t even give up the ship, what we’re watching for the rest of the season kind of boils down to typical wishcasting. Teams get better in the NFL by patching their weak spots or watching young players take leaps.
Let’s start with the former. Simply put, the Cowboys need to stop hurting the Cowboys.
I wrote about Rico Dowdle a couple weeks ago and why he’s the only competent running back on Dallas’ roster. The Cowboys immediately decided they needed Ezekiel Elliott to out-carry Dowdle, only for Mike McCarthy to explain to everyone that Dowdle needs more carries. Yes, Mike, we knew that already. I don’t quite count Dowdle as a part of a young core for the Cowboys, but it’s clear that not playing him in favor of Elliott is profoundly stupid. That’s the level of decision the Cowboys are making right now.
Defensively, Dallas is between a rock and a hard place. Zimmer wants to run the stuff Zimmer has always run, but the players already on hand are not stout enough in the run game to do what he wants to do. The players that Zimmer has cycled in to try to execute his plan have aged out of being able to hold those roles. Eric Kendricks is the only new addition who has really played up to par, and even he has a lowlight reel. Zimmer lifers like Linval Joseph and Nick Vigil just aren’t good enough to merit playing time. Normally, this would be a situation where I’d advocate for aggressive practice-squad cycling to try to find someone who works, and to that end the Cowboys have brought in Carlos Watkins and K.J. Henry off squads. But Watkins is, as with the Zimmer lifers, just an average-floor rotational lineman at this point. Henry has barely played.
The easier way to do this would be for Zimmer to make some changes to his schemes, but that’s just not going to happen. This is a guy who in minicamp said, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to do it the way I want it done. I know [when] you try to come in and do somebody else’s thing, it just doesn’t go well.”
Well, what do you do when a coach like that isn’t able to do his own thing well? The Cowboys will get healthier on defense, and getting Parsons back will be a big boost. But there’s no reason Zimmer needs to be here next year, and thus it almost feels like Dallas is wasting the rookie contract clocks, because the long-term plan that will work next isn’t in place anyway. It reminds me a lot of the Texans in 2022 with Lovie Smith. You want to see what third overall pick Derek Stingley has, but he’s playing bump-and-run, Cover-2, and none of that accentuates what he’s good at, so do the numbers and stats really matter?
In lieu of changes, then, the Cowboys need to see growth from their young players—and fast. They need a linebacker out of the Damone Clark, Marist Liufau, and DeMarvion Overshown picks to prove that he can start next year. Right now I’d say Clark has the inside track, even if he’s not what Zimmer wants him to be. (In fact, I have no idea why Clark isn’t a starter.)
They need Tyler Guyton not to get benched—sorry, “rested for injury”—and need him and Cooper Beebe to take big steps forward. Both of those players are playing like the rookies they are. Guyton can’t stop getting called for penalties, which is only partly on him. The league’s best teams create the ecosystem to where growing a young player isn’t as on the spot as this. For Guyton specifically, these struggles are amplified because the rest of the line also isn’t playing well. It’s not Guyton’s fault that Terence Steele is struggling. It’s also not Guyton’s fault that the Cowboys chose to let Tyler Biadasz walk in free agency and replaced him with a fellow rookie playing center for the first time. But the Cowboys let last year’s line get old together for a long time, and other than Tyler Smith, there hasn’t been a successful investment and development plan. They stumbled upon Steele as a college free agent, which worked well enough when he was on a rookie contract instead of a big-money extension that looks worse by the week.
Elsewhere, they need Jalen Tolbert to prove he can handle being a No. 2 receiver on a good offense. The Steelers game was a start, but he disappeared under more aggressive coverage from Detroit. All of the Cowboys’ receivers are getting big doses of man coverage because they haven’t proven they can beat it. Lamb has the third-most man coverage targets in the league per FTN’s Statshub. Tolbert’s DVOA against man coverage is a respectable 15.3 percent—he’s better than average—but he has only 15 targets against man coverage because he’s often not open. There’s the issue.
Does all of this feel ambitious? When you are as deprived as the Cowboys are of other solutions at these positions, you simply have to hope for the best: hope that one or two of these players take a step forward in the second half of the season and grow into supplementary parts of the core. It’s not exciting to watch youngsters take their lumps, but it is a necessary part of the process when you can’t just bring back prime Tyron Smith.
This is what happens to many NFL teams: they grow old, and the window slams shut. The Cowboys managed to avoid really ever having to hit the reset button from the Romo years because Prescott came out of Mississippi State ready to make every draft expert look stupid. The only year Dallas has finished under .500 since drafting Prescott was 2020, when he was lost for the season after Week 5.
It was a remarkable run. But that run is over now. The only thing up for debate is whether the team is ready to embrace the truth.
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