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By Bob Sturm Dec 21, 2020
I don’t blame anyone who has moved on to literally anything else in their lives this Christmas season. If you have decided to enjoy Sunday walks or reading a book or learning the guitar instead of watching what is left of the 2020 Dallas Cowboys play out their string of games, I might question the level of “diehard” you claim to be, but I won’t question your ability to block out disappointment and keep your blood pressure under control. Sports are enjoyable until they are not. Then they become an added source of irritation when — let’s be honest — nobody needs irritation added to their normal intake levels in 2020. We don’t need this football team to provide more.
But if you have stuck with this thing to this point — and you certainly did if you are reading my Morning After column — I assume you are trying to figure out what this all means. Dallas (what is left of them) beat the reigning NFC champion San Francisco 49ers (what is left of them) on Sunday in Arlington, 41-33, in a game that was pretty easy to explain for most of the afternoon — until, that is, it got sort of crazy late to make people think that 74 combined points were scored because there was exceptional offense being played by both teams.
If you watched, you know better. There was very little exceptional being done by either side to make anyone believe that they had figured anything out. The Dallas offense still has trouble with doing much that an offensive line can support. They can’t really pass protect very long, and their QB has been rattled for so many years behind lines that cannot keep him from harm that he doesn’t trust his protection enough to find out the hard way very often. So Andy Dalton throws passes very quickly, and therefore his yards per attempt remain very low, as does the overall offensive production. On the other hand, Dalton takes care of the football and makes very smart decisions most of the time, which keeps his team on the positive end of the turnover battle (provided he isn’t fumbling because he took a sack). You can see he takes a pragmatic approach when you watch the other quarterbacks the Cowboys have played recently. It’s happened too late to save themselves from a horrendous record, but for all their faults, the Cowboys have begun playing winning football in the second half.
On the other side is Nick Mullens, the current 49ers understudy (but surely not for long considering the way he plays the game). On occasion, he will be aggressive — or reckless — and throw one right at an enemy defender, and this lack of awareness costs his team everything in a fashion that is impossible to compensate for. That’s true despite having a rushing offense that is still worthy of considerable praise, as San Francisco gashed the Cowboys for another 150-yard day (not terribly uncommon in 2020). The 49ers are very simply playing losing football when you go on the road and cough up the ball four times and do not get it back even once.
We covered this last week with Cincinnati and therefore won’t belabor the point too much this week, but so much of the NFL is simply taking care of the football. So much of winning football is getting the ball from your opponent more than they get it from you. This allows for free points and short fields and asking your adversary to play uphill the entire day. That alters their playcalling, their disposition and their risk-taking, which usually digs the hole even deeper. This recipe is as old as the game itself.
Conversely, of course, is what the Cowboys looked like prior to Dak Prescott’s injury. They had all the production in the world, were tops in the league throughout and still were not playing winning football. That, of course, is because almost all of the metrics our game keeps — especially the ones that TV shows to brag about the No. 1 offense — to calculate the offensive production machine leaves out giveaways. But all the yardage in the world does not and cannot matter if the drive ends with a careless fumble down near the goalline, even if you did grab 94 yards beforehand.
So the two ultimate questions that people ask about yesterday’s win — the second in a row for this Cowboys team and the third in five games since the bye week — are:
- Why are they winning games and costing themselves draft position when they are supposed to be losing to help that and “tanking”?
- How in the world are the Cowboys playing such “winning football” now after playing “losing football” all year?
I have spent two months hearing from readers and listeners who cannot believe the Cowboys are now going to screw up their season by winning games down the stretch. They have been told by their football intelligentsia that “tanking is how we turn this around” because obviously, the fourth pick is better than the 14th pick, right? Of course it is!
If you read me for any period of time, you know there are certain things about the way we cover sports as a media collective that makes me sad but also motivates me to keep doing my job as well as I can. As long as football media are trying to tell fans that losing is the path to winning, I will continue to battle back with what the guys in those uniforms and those front offices really feel. Today, I will not attack fantasy football’s role in actually making football fans understand the game more poorly; I can get into that some other time. But the same avenues of this business that do seem to present the game in a fantasy football, logic-based sort of way is to try to equate the NFL to basketball’s logic in that losing is how we ultimately win. Let me explain.
Nothing in the NBA has proven to alter the course of history like adding that one generational, difference-making superstar to your city and your roster. For this reason, that sport (which I also love) has many stories of how a team acquires a player of that magnitude with tales of cold envelopes and, yes, losing on purpose. For every new franchise savior that comes along, it is now routine for the entire league to have hundreds of mini-threads about “should we tank for our next era of greatness?” by well-meaning fans who fear what they have been told about being stuck-in-the-middle, where I guess they remain in a purgatory of .500 for the rest of their lives. The San Antonio Spurs seemed to have perfectly timed two miserable 20-win years to secure two generational saviors in 1989 and 1997; otherwise, they have had three wonderful decades. We know about Chicago and Cleveland getting their guys, and now Dallas appears to have stunk at just the perfect time for Luka Doncic. It must be the way.
Here is the thing — that sport is not this sport. It has never been proven that one player can be linked to long-term success other than quarterbacks. Every other position has its great players and Hall of Fame legends, but those great left tackles, wide receivers, tight ends, safeties, linebackers, and even pass rushers and shutdown corners have played on as many 6-10 teams as 12-4 teams. There is almost no correlation at all.
But what about the franchise QB? Shouldn’t everyone want the next great gunslinger? Well, first, I am not sure how that equates to the Cowboys’ current situation because Dallas probably should not be in the market for a new QB right now. But look at the current list of franchise QBs. Patrick Mahomes was the 10th overall pick by a team that originally had the 27th pick; Kansas City did not tank, but merely traded up to get him. Aaron Rodgers was the 24th pick. Drew Brees was the 32nd pick. Ben Roethlisberger was the 11th pick. Tom Brady was pick No. 199. Now I would probably like to have Kyler Murray on my roster; like Peyton Manning before him, he was first overall. But the road to long-term success requires much more than even these players to lift a team. As is the case with anything in our sport, one guy is not fixing all the issues.
The general point is that tanking has no long-term successful track record, and I am not even sure how you would do it in a practical sense. Do you tell your coaches and players to lose on purpose? No, that is insanity. Do you shut down a few players due to injury? Who? The quarterback you want to shut down is probably also the guy you are trying to replace, and do you think he wants to lose his job? It makes no sense. So would I rather have the third pick than the 23rd pick? Yes. But how does that relate to anything on the football field yesterday?
What does relate to the next Cowboys winner is seeing that you have the ability to build a little wind in your sails during the second half of a lost season. It is possible to fix some of what needs repairing in the offseason sooner than that and in real-time. Perhaps players need to be replaced, and so do some coaches, but why put off until next spring what could be built against real opponents right here and now?
I believe if you purposely lose games or even hint at that idea as a viable way to improve, you are living in fantasy world. Now, to be clear, we must utilize some shades of gray for this discussion the closer you get to a specific player in a specific situation (see: Trevor Lawrence and the 2020 New York Jets). But as it pertains to the 2020 Dallas Cowboys, who neither need a young franchise QB nor were terribly close to the top pick in the draft, there is nothing about losing that gets you closer to winning with a first-year coaching staff. Nothing. So stop it. It is idiocy, and the players, coaches and employees of the Cowboys organization will actually tell you that winning three of five or five of seven down the stretch changes the temperature and enthusiasm in the room enough to energize the entire offseason.
Winning begets winning. Losing does not. Not in this sport, at least: There is no LeBron waiting for you if you can stop winning games well enough to get to him. I don’t know why respected and intelligent media guys try to tell people it does matter, but I will stand on this opposite wall. They have anecdotes of how “one slot higher could have gotten this guy.” Well, I have anecdotes of how a team went from 4-8 to 8-8 and then went on to host the NFC Championship Game one year later — at Mike McCarthy’s last gig, by the way.
If the current Dallas Cowboys have hit on something, it is that taking care of the football is vital and to not lose sight of that on either side. They have stopped the bleeding. After 15 giveaways in their first six games (2.5 per game), they have turned the faucet down to a reasonable nine giveaways in the last eight games (1.1 per game).
Meanwhile, the real exciting thing is that maybe the defense is starting to get the football from the opposition at a rate that can make people believe that they’re not completely incompetent. After tallying just three takeaways in the first seven games (0.4 per game), they have flipped it magically to 15 in the last seven (2.1 per game). So, quite obviously, the game is now easier, and with short fields (and big special teams and defensive assistance), you can put up 41 points without even 300 offensive yards.
Complementary football works and makes wins easy to find. The Cowboys never had a chance in the first seven games with a minus-13 turnover margin. The next seven, in which they have a plus-seven turnover margin, actually have this team still in the mix with two games to play. We now can see that the organization is not hopeless. Add back the special players on the offense, and I submit you now know what is needed to fix a defense that still needs repairs.
I have no idea what happens next other than the Eagles will be here Sunday for a meaningful football game, which was highly unlikely a month back. But if you want me to tell you that winning football games is a big mistake and that the chance to pick fifth is now just going to be about 15th — to that, I say: good. Losing is almost never the path to winning. This team needed to start winning again, and it appears they are not completely lost at sea for 2021.
