- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 120,029
By Jon Machota 5h ago
TAMPA, Fla. — Dak Prescott walked up to Tom Brady near midfield after Thursday night’s game, slapped hands and then shared a few words and a quick hug with the seven-time Super Bowl champion. As the two began to go their separate ways, Prescott added a quick comment.
“We’ll see y’all again,” the Cowboys quarterback said.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not on the Cowboys’ schedule later in the season. Prescott was referring to playing the defending Super Bowl champs in the playoffs.
“That’s just the confidence I have in this group,” Prescott said, “and the expectations I have. This is a playoff team that’s going to make a big push this year. We got to continue to get better and we’ll make a step from tonight and we’ll find a way to get better tomorrow.
“We’ve got a good team and good men. I’m excited about this season.”
The Cowboys didn’t travel to Florida for any moral victories, but there were several positive signs that came from their 31-29 season-opening loss at Raymond James Stadium.
The most notable was Prescott’s performance in his first game in 333 days. Not only did he prove that he’s healthy and fully recovered from his gruesome season-ending ankle injury from last October, but he showed that he might actually be better.
Prescott tied a career-high with 58 pass attempts, completing 42 for 403 yards, three touchdowns, one interception and a 101.4 passer rating. To compare, Brady finished 32 of 50 for 379 yards, four touchdowns, two interceptions and a 97.0 passer rating.
The Cowboys didn’t necessarily plan on throwing it that often, but averaging only 3.3 yards per carry on the ground wasn’t going to get the job done against Tampa Bay’s talented defensive front.
“Obviously you want to run the ball more, you want to be balanced,” Prescott said. “But the pass was working for us, so that’s just the way that the game played out. We’ve got the talent on offense to be able to do that. We’re going to come in each game with a plan to be balanced and if we have to get heavy one way or another, I’m sure we will. I’m sure there will be games where we run the ball a lot more than we did tonight or we planned to.”
As well as the Cowboys played offensively, multiple players talked after the game about how much better they could have done in the red zone. They settled for field goals three times.
Amari Cooper, who had game-highs of 13 catches, 139 yards and two touchdowns, mentioned that he recently broke a wide receiver huddle at practice by saying to the group that they are good, but they need to be working to be great. Prescott overheard and jumped in.
“We’re not trying to be great,” he said, “we’re trying to be the best.”
Prescott’s point was that there are great teams every year that don’t win it all.
“We can be great and come up short,” Prescott said. “I feel like that’s what tonight was. It was a great effort, but we came up short. We want to be the best.”
Here are five other Cowboys notes from Thursday night.
1. Good and bad on defense. The good: They forced four takeaways, coming via Trevon Diggs and Jourdan Lewis interceptions and forced fumbles by DeMarcus Lawrence and Damontae Kazee. Randy Gregory recovered the Lawrence fumble. Lewis recovered the one caused by Kazee. There were some miscommunication issues but it didn’t seem to be anywhere near the volume they had last season.
New defensive coordinator Dan Quinn was never going to completely turn this group around with a few new free agents, one draft class and a few months of practices. It’s going to take time, but finishing middle of the pack in the NFL is still very possible. And with what they have on offense, that should be enough to win the division and maybe even get hot at the right time.
The bad: Brady seemed to be targeting cornerback Anthony Brown throughout. Brown ended up with a game-high 11 tackles because of the frequent passes in his direction. There also wasn’t nearly enough pressure on Brady. The game’s greatest player deserves a lot of credit for that, but the Cowboys also needed to do better than finish without any sacks and only two quarterback hits.
“It’s real disappointing,” Gregory said. “We made a lot of plays. I felt like we gave up too many explosive plays. They turned over the ball, which is good, but we need to cut down on the explosive plays. We go out there with 2 minutes left, and we need to go out there and get a sack on them. We can’t let him go out there and pick us apart like that.
“We fully expected to win this game coming in here. If a few things go differently, we win this game. We said in the locker room, that’s the defending champs, that’s the guy, the team, they believe is going to win another Super Bowl, we’re right up there with them. We believe that. We just need to build on that, come back, get better.”
Damontae Kazee forced this Chris Godwin fumble in the fourth quarter (Jeremy Reper / USA Today)
2. CeeDee Lamb drops. He had two early in the first quarter and then a third that bounced off his hands near midfield and resulted in Prescott’s lone interception. Lamb finished with seven catches on 15 targets for 104 yards and a touchdown.
“Personally, it was very disappointing,” Lamb said, “especially on my end considering I played a part in us continuing being down because of the drops I had. You live and you learn, and I’m going to be better for this team.”
3. Greg Zuerlein’s struggles. It started with his ugly miss wide left from 31 yards out midway through the second quarter. It continued with a missed extra point two minutes later. Zuerlein also missed a 60-yard field goal in the final minute of the first half.
“Obviously, missing such an easy kick, you don’t even practice that,” Zuerlein said of the 31-yarder. “It’s automatic. You miss something like that and you analyze it for two minutes, figure out what you did wrong. You have to move on.”
Zuerlein didn’t get any work in training camp as he was recovering from offseason back surgery. He returned near the end of preseason, kicking in Dallas’ final preseason game.
“No excuses,” he said “If I’m out there, I should make the kicks. No excuses. … I know we played well enough to win. If I did my job, we win that game. I feel bad for the guys in there that played their ass off, and I didn’t hold up my end of the deal. If the team that that’s good, returning every player after a Super Bowl victory, and we’re right there, I just have to do my job.”
4. Mike McCarthy’s biggest takeaways. “I thought our guys fought like hell tonight,” the Cowboys head coach said. “A lot of good things will come out of tonight’s contest. … I’m sure when we sit down and watch the tape, there will be some things that we can learn from and clean up. That’s what every game gives you. That’s what every year gives you. And especially, that’s what every start of the year gives you. These are the games that are barometers. At the end of the day, we came here to win. We came up a little short. But we have to learn from tonight. We have to go get that win next week in L.A. because these road wins are hard to come by and you have to get that first one.”
5. Micah Parsons’ first game. For the first time since the 2019 Cotton Bowl, Parsons played a full football game. The first-round pick finished with seven tackles, a quarterback hit and a pass deflection. He seemed to be most frustrated with the defense’s inability to get off the field in the final 90 seconds when Brady drove Tampa Bay down for the game-winning field goal.
“No excuses,” Parsons said. “Excuses are for the weak. … There’s a lot of potential in this team. I think we got a chance to be a really good defense, a damn good defense. … I’m just going to keep getting better. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Injury updates: WR Michael Gallup left the game with a left ankle injury. The Cowboys only shared that he will be re-evaluated Friday. Kazee didn’t finish the game after being poked in the eye by Antonio Brown late in the fourth quarter. Kazee said he was experiencing some blurry vision.
