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By Bob Sturm 33m ago
Today is Monday, October 26th. This has been a very poor month for the Dallas Cowboys.
Thankfully, they will play no more games before this page on the calendar is flipped. I am going to assume November cannot be worse — at the very least, it features a bye week.
But before we tackle a new low in Cowboys football 2020 from their trip to the nation’s capital, allow a brief review of a few previous Monday Mornings.
Here is the one from October 5th, after a painful loss to the Cleveland Browns:
“Enough is enough.
Sunday featured an unacceptable performance from a team that has, once again, frustrated its fanbase in record time. And if the rookies or league-minimum players are the ones disappointing you, then perhaps you built too top-heavy a roster.”
That would soon seem like no big deal, because October 12th offered this:
“I regret to inform you that this Monday morning, with the sun not yet risen, I remain relatively speechless about how to best talk through this Cowboys-Giants game. A quick scan will reveal that my note-taking and record-keeping was very thorough and complete until roughly 5:36 pm last night. The details after that are pretty sparse.
It would be incorrect to call yourself speechless when you break off 2,000-word summaries on a daily basis, but I do not feel the normal overflowing of hot opinions percolating between the ears. Instead, I believe I share the views of both teams, the fans in attendance and all the media who were at AT&T Stadium last night.
At about 24 minutes to six o’clock, the lead story of the game — a Cowboys team trying to figure out what they are capable of doing amidst all of the self-imposed mistakes while attempting to defeat a motivated division opponent — slipped away into the night. The hero of this era of Cowboys football lay injured and in shock on the field, knowing his season was over and his career might be in peril.”
Last Tuesday morning, October 20th, showed us what this team was probably going to give us moving forward:
“We thought Cleveland was probably rock bottom. Then, last week, the Cowboys lost their best chance to survive with a broken ankle.
And then last night happened, and we realized we have 10 more weeks of Cowboys football. The survival chances are diminishing at such a rapid rate that rock bottom may just be a coping mechanism more than anything. After all, rock bottom suggests things can get better very easily — that they can’t get worse.
Last night might have been worse than any performance yet, mostly because there was almost no hope of improvement. This is what is left: A backup quarterback, an offensive line that in no way resembles the group that left training camp and a franchise RB who is hurting far more than he is helping. Oh, let’s not forget a defense on pace to allow the most points in the “post-merger NFL,” one that unfortunately does not seem to have a whole lot of resolve for the fight, it appears.”
There was a reason that nobody should have thought this version of the Cowboys could navigate three of the toughest defenses on their schedule after what Arizona did to them. Washington may not be loaded with tremendous skill-position players, but they are the new kid on the block who has invested heavily in his defensive front.
Will that approach turn Washington into a winner? That franchise has looked hapless for years, but I will tell you that after watching the Washington front unleash Hades on the Cowboys’ backup-laden offensive line, there should be no question who has the advantage there. Just look at these names. Jonathan Allen was one of the best players we had seen at Alabama in a long time. Montez Sweat and Da’Ron Payne needed no introduction during their drafts. And Washington passing on Tua Tagavailoa and Justin Herbert for Chase Young last April was a bold move for a team without a sure-fire quarterback, but they thought Young was at least equal to Myles Garrett and Nick Bosa. We haven’t seen any indication so far that they were wrong.
That group up front, supplemented by 11 called blitzes that yielded two completions and an interception, demonstrated that Dallas had no chance offensively.
I say that with Andy Dalton as the QB, but allow me to say I believe it would apply to Dak Prescott, Tony Romo, Troy Aikman, Roger Staubach — just about anyone. Those four are all better quarterbacks than Mr. Dalton, but none would have the time to prove that, and many might have exited the game because of the beating they were forced to take before being knocked out.
Heck, seeing Dalton light up the sideline with furious anger was refreshing. He was here to compete and wanted to know who was ready to join him.
Well, when Jon Bostic inflicted a dirty and unnecessary hit on a slide, we found out who was ready to join him. And the answer was as troubling as anything we have seen besides the direction of Dak’s foot a few weeks back.
What did Dallas do about an assault on their QB?
Nothing.
They did exactly what they have done all season, to be honest. The Cowboys could have saved the plane fuel and not even bothered. Now we’re left with mistake after mistake that leads people to then spend hours debating whether the team has quit or whether they were trying their best but just stunk.
It happened against their last incompetent opponent, one that has always been nearby when failure hits so that Jerry Jones can always point at the franchise now known as “FOOTBALL TEAM” on the scoreboard. Usually, he could tell his remaining loyalists that at least they were better than Washington and have won something more recently than they have.
Even that team is laughing at Dallas now. Now on their third QB of the season and with no real prospects for anything above beating Dallas senseless, Washington took a cheap shot at the Cowboys’ QB and left him laying on the turf, a play he could not remember later. And what did anyone do about it?
Nothing.
Dalton laid there with his helmet spinning nearby, and the Cowboys all decided that this was a shame, so they quietly checked on him. Meanwhile, Bostic stood nearby and acted like he didn’t deliberately try to injure a sliding player by bouncing his head off the turf with velocity that is tough to watch.
I know a new player is likely trying not to hurt his team by taking a retaliation penalty, but if you want to endear yourself to your locker room, fanbase and city, young rookie, perhaps knock that guy to next week with a persuasive body-block that he will not soon forget. If you take liberties with one of us, you are picking a fight with all 53. Will you get ejected and fined? Maybe, but every guy wearing your colors will pay that fine down and buy you dinner.
That is a sign of real problems right now. That is the culture I talk about seemingly every week as you dive deeper and deeper into the underbelly of this roster. You realize that not only do you lose the quality of Travis Frederick or Zack Martin, but you also lose the leadership and unity of their presence. This is a brotherhood. This is a gang. You will not assault one of ours without this whole thing blowing up.
Instead, it appears the footage shows pretty much the entire line running around Bostic to check on Dalton. They probably reacted as a compassionate human being would, but not as a warrior who is tired of being thrown around. And that might be the biggest issue with this current 2020 Cowboys culture. And, at the risk of claiming another “rock bottom,” this one seems to have rattled Mike McCarthy and Ezekiel Elliott far more than the 38-10 loss to Arizona did.
“We speak all the time about playing for one another, respecting one another,” McCarthy said. “That was definitely probably not the response you would expect.”
Elliott was one of the only team leaders on the field at that moment. At first, he talked about how you can’t hurt your team further by getting ejected yourself and making them even more shorthanded. Finally, however, he conceded when questioned about the docile response, “If you are asking that question, then I do wish we would have reacted stronger.”
That moment likely isn’t close to the biggest moment of the season, and even though Dalton might be lost for quite a while, it had very little to do with the outcome of an absolute butt-kicking of the highest order. They were getting drilled in this game either way. But the lack of unity and spirit in this Cowboys team is calling some to compare how much this team looked like they “quit” under Jason Garrett versus what this team has looked like since Dak Prescott’s broken ankle.
Sports start at the most basic level of caring about each other and fighting for the man to your left and your right. If you don’t care about the team, the cause and the helmet, then go play an individual sport.
This team is already showing all of the worst signs of complete chaos. In fact, they are showing the telltale signs of a team that wants to get their coach fired. A coach who they have grown tired of and have decided they have seen enough. That should never be happening in Year 1 of a new administration, and there is nothing in Mike McCarthy’s past that indicates it has happened before. He is a Pittsburgh guy who has no time for normal football primadonna nonsense and wants 53 guys with dirty uniforms and bruises galore smiling with a tooth missing and a little blood on their face. He wants gritty football and a battle for every inch.
Instead, he signed up to run the organization best known for the artwork and the $300 million yacht in the Mediterranean as well as the most expensive and plush stadium, one that pairs nicely with the most expensive and plush practice palace.
This is a battle of cultures, and McCarthy is just now finding out how far he is from the muddy uniforms of Pennsylvania. He’s explaining to those who love the easy life of “Dallas Cowboys National Country Club” that they’re being asked to help with the manual labor to rebuild something worth investing time and energy into, but it might cost them some muddy clothes and a few bruised and cut fingers. They might even be asked to give up a few front teeth if things get extra ugly and they have to defend a teammate in a bar fight. Randy White can show the way, if you are confused.
McCarthy has his faults. He tried to do too much in his first year, and the defense has no excuses for their lack of resolve that has been spotted by a few select highly compensated “leaders. He needs to extract some bad apples quickly if they don’t convince him they are here to fight.
But the top priority is not a fight against anything but the way football works at even the lowest levels. He probably didn’t realize that Dallas Cowboys football had patches of style over substance for a long time. But the more good leaders they lose to injury, the more that disease permeates the roster. All that remains is an overwhelming group of guys who are either too young to know better or too old to care enough.
Frankly, this shouldn’t be McCarthy’s battle to fight. It should be a given that they weren’t wearing ironic sweatshirts that said “FIGHT” on them around the facility. The most basic prerequisite for an NFL team is caring enough to give it everything they have. I don’t blame a junior varsity offensive line for not having a clue of stopping and protecting against those four destroyers of worlds in Washington. But I do blame them for not wanting to fight every last one of them in righteous anger after the Dalton hit.
Instead, they all did nothing.
Not a thing.
And now we ask what the coach is going to do about it because we are already at the point where the city is wondering if he needs to go. I will repeat that I think that is ridiculous given his circumstances, but it might come down to this: Either he extracts those who apparently have no fight yet to give, or they will have him extracted in the winter.
Amazing, but that actually might be where we are. Hang in there. I hear the Mavericks start playing in a few months.