The Cowboys were cooked before Dak Prescott suffered a hamstring injury that will sideline him for several weeks, and now they are thoroughly chargrilled. Whether or not they know it, a boring, bland football team is about to play out the string, which leaves Dallas with two potential courses of action.
One is to pivot to fact-finding and information gathering. Plunder the roster and other teams’ practice squads for anyone who might be a value-add next year, when there’s some shred of hope for better. Scrimp on the margins. Cling tight to draft picks, because they will appreciate in value as the losses mount and because drafting remains the one thing this franchise does rather well. (Considering how allergic it is to making a real effort in free agency, it could be the only thing it aspires to do well.) Shed players on expiring contracts if a buyer dials up the Jones hotline prior to today’s NFL trade deadline at 3 p.m.
In other words, confront reality, the way rational people do when forces both in and out of their control don’t align in their favor.
Naturally, this is not what the Cowboys are doing.
Dallas is digging in, which one can discern from Jerry Jones’ latest disingenuous deployment of our most-hackneyed poker term, as well as two notable news items out of The Star in the last 24 hours. The first is Cooper Rush, Prescott’s long-tenured backup and a renowned Swiftie, will replace him in the starting lineup. This is the smart play for a team intent on winning football games—Rush is a perfectly cromulent fill-in starter—which makes it a rather dumb one for a team with no incentive to do so. Rush turns 31 in a little over two weeks, and his skill set was calcified years ago; Dallas learns nothing by playing him.
But it might by starting Trey Lance before he fully submerges into the briny deep of sunk costs. Yes, Trey Lance, the impending free agent who managed the gargantuanly mediocre feat of getting picked off five times in a preseason game after Dallas burned a fourth-round pick to acquire him prior to last season. Lance faces long odds of salvaging a place in the Cowboys’ future, but the mere flicker of possibility should be enough to throw him into the lineup and see what happens. Perhaps he displays enough progress to unseat Rush as Prescott’s long-term backup. Or perhaps he displays enough of the traits that made him a top-three draft pick to bait another team into signing him, thereby conveying a compensation pick back to Dallas. Little to gain, certainly, but even less to lose provided Lance does so in a serious sample, taking real snaps, instead of the gimmicky subpackage role that Jerry Jones is already hinting at.
Then there’s Jones’ great stab at a self-described “storybook” move to turn Dallas’ season around. Paying a fourth-round pick for Jonathan Mingo and a seventh-rounder just a year after Carolina drafted him 39th overall is a move that can pass for appetizing at first blush. The Cowboys lack for impact receiver talent after CeeDee Lamb, and they especially want for the big-bodied kind. Enter Mingo, a hulking 6-foot-2, 220-pounder with the same draft capital that All-Pros A.J. Brown and D.K. Metcalf each carried out of the same alma mater (Ole Miss) six years ago. There is discernible physical upside here, and with two years and change remaining on his rookie deal, time to realize it.
Or there would be, were Jonathan Mingo not rounding into the worst wide receiver in the NFL. I’m not exaggerating. Last year, Mingo finished with the second-worst receiving mark ever by Aaron Schatz’s Defensive Yards Over Replacement. Per The Fan’s Bobby Belt, 126 players have earned at least 75 targets in the past two NFL seasons. Mingo ranks 126th in success rate—by a mile.
That goes a long way toward explaining why Mingo quickly got surpassed in Carolina by two players who entered the league a year after him, one of whom, Jalen Coker, was an undrafted free agent. And why Mingo has managed all of 12 catches in nine games this season, despite the Panthers playing most of the year with a banged-up tight end rotation and without last year’s leading receiver, Adam Thielen. Smart scouting minds have already pointed out why Carolina didn’t do Mingo any favors in how they deployed him, but the most logical antidote for that—deploy him in the slot as a bull smashing apart tea-cup-sized slot cornerbacks—also doesn’t seem likely when Lamb plays a healthy amount of his snaps inside.
For the privilege of acquiring this, Jones paid more than he sold Amari Cooper for two off seasons ago and considerably more than Carolina returned when it spun its best pass catcher, Diontae Johnson, to Baltimore a week ago for the chance to turn a sixth-round pick into a fifth. There is a strong chance the Cowboys just surrendered a shot at a viable NFL starter—scroll down this list and count how many running backs selected in the fourth round or later would sit atop Dallas’ depth chart—for a player too raw to help them now, too bad to help them later, and too much of an investment to justify (in the front office’s minds) pouring as many additional resources as they should into beefing up Prescott’s supporting cast.
All of this is how bad teams stay bad: by waffling on a direction, by getting profligate on the margins, by refusing to accept that pockmarks on their process are scars, not smudges. The last 24 hours don’t mean the Cowboys are there yet. But these moves just don’t offer much hope.
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