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Morning After Week 11 - No Place Like Home
Houston Texans are the latest to destroy Cowboys in front of a defeated home crowd.
Bob Sturm
Nov 19, 2024
It is the same game. It is Groundhog Day.
I assume that this nightmare cannot continue forever because the Giants will visit AT&T Stadium in 10 days, and that should finally end the loop of indefinite sadness for the home fans.
Now, hold on. I am not promising a win. Nobody would be that insane.
But I am willing to submit to you that there should be competitive football on Thanksgiving Day. The odds of the very bad New York Giants coming to town and crushing the Cowboys in Dallas by three touchdowns or so seem rather unlikely.
Not impossible, mind you. Just rather unlikely.
So, that would mean the loop of indefinite sadness that the cameras catch over and over again should come to at least a temporary halt. You know, the ones where a Cowboys fan is decked out in his most eye-catching gear, only to look like he is starting to wonder why he pays so much money to make himself miserable. The crowd shots of bewildered and dismayed Cowboys fans are about the only way the television networks can get through the second half of another non-competitive football game in Dallas.
Because the Cowboys keep playing the exact same home game over and over again, and the patterns are pretty clear and obvious by now.
On Monday night, the Houston Texans became the sixth consecutive team to play at AT&T Stadium and humiliate the Cowboys in front of their home “loyalists.” I use that term loosely because the percentage of visiting fans who do not want to miss this opportunity to laugh at Jerry Jones in person is growing by the week. And, heck, the percentage of home fans who have had enough seems to be growing, too, if the signs and the booing from the various levels of the stadium are any indication.
The Texans were the opponent, and they have their own issues. But still, they were able to play a reasonably clean game with moments of brilliance and probably felt in total control from the moment Joe Mixon broke his first long touchdown run. They were never caught and certainly never trailed before winning a game by the largest margin of the season and allowing the fewest points in 2024, too.
Superlatives are reached when teams play Dallas this year. There is a matchup problem pretty much everywhere on the field, on both sides of the ball, that will not let up. Dallas has tried different things. Sometimes they have been conservative and careful; other times they have been crazy aggressive with poor gambles, and it doesn’t matter.
They simply stink at a level we are unfamiliar with. They are making us compare them to 1960, 1989, and yes, 2000. We have reached levels of despair that have almost no equal around here.
Even when they play reasonably well – relative to our expectations for Cooper Rush, the defense, or pretty much any part of this team – they still lose by three touchdowns or more. And now, it seems, the opponent is just a detail. Every opponent is too much for this team.
Below we find a lady in a Santa Claus outfit with a sign that says “All I want for Christmas is for Jerry to sell the team.”
That is a pretty big ask, lady, but I support your optimism.
This is where we are. It is impossible to describe how “down bad” this organization finds itself right now. But it is as low a point as I can remember.
The thing that makes you shake your head the most in disbelief is that we are talking about a football team that was good enough to win 70% of its games over a very long three-year sample and to win 100% of its games at home for almost two full seasons. The Cowboys’ 16-game winning streak was the longest in professional football since the Tom Brady Patriots won 18. They were an objectively good football team as recently as 2023, both in winning and dominating home games.
And yet, they are threatening to be listed among the worst home teams in NFL history if this continues much longer.
So, yes, these last 30 years have not been nearly as fun as the 30 years before them in Dallas Cowboys football, but I want to emphasize that this six-game home streak we are currently witnessing, which has stretched from January to November, is unlike anything we have ever seen. I swear.
Allow me to attempt to prove it – since I obviously don’t have a very good explanation for how this happened.
– This was from ESPN’s Todd Archer: The Cowboys have been outscored by 118 points in five home games. That’s the third-largest margin in a team’s first five home games of a season in the Super Bowl era. The fact that two teams in NFL history have done worse at home is hard to believe, but true. So, shout out to the 2013 Jacksonville Jaguars (-123) and the 1966 Atlanta Falcons (-119). Perhaps if we knew they were just one touchdown from all-time history, someone would have tried to make that happen.
– This was from The33rdTeam: The Cowboys have allowed 37.4 PPG at home in 2024. That would be the most PPG allowed at home by any team in a season in NFL history. The 1960 Cowboys currently hold this record (36.5 PPG allowed at home). Now, there are four more home games and a few of them are against very poor opponents, so we probably should not project them to break the record of the expansion Cowboys of 1960, but it is squarely on the radar as we approach Thanksgiving Day.
– According to Monday Night Football: The Cowboys have trailed by at least 20 points in six straight home games That is the longest streak in NFL history.
– According to Bobby Belt: The Cowboys have scored five touchdowns at home this season. The New Orleans Saints scored six in Week 2 and still have the most of any NFL team scored in this stadium 2024, unless you consider the fact Green Bay scored seven last January in the playoffs.
Those three factoids are different ways of reporting the same news. This Dallas Cowboys team went from a fringe pick for the Super Bowl as the 2023 Playoffs began to a team that will pick in the Top 10 and possibly make a run at the Top 5 in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
Obviously, as someone who spends all day and night covering this team and trying to keep a running commentary of its daily activities, I should have some reasonable explanations, right?
I should, but I would suggest that if I had seen any of this coming, I would have enough money to retire right now because I would have taken down Vegas with a projection that a team on a historical 16-game home winning streak could suddenly go six straight without being competitive in any of them.
It truly is the weirdest thing.
Here are the numbers. I thought we should show the point differentials (obviously poor), the turnover differentials (negative in every game!), and the rushing yardage differentials (negative in every game!):
That is negative 134 points, negative 13 turnovers, and negative 663 rushing yards in just six games – 110.5 yards per game on the ground.
Then we showed the point differential through the end of the third quarter to take out the garbage-time cosmetic points. They are down 129 points after the third quarter of each of these six beauties, which averages out to 21.5 points per game. Three touchdowns. Or, to make it worse, a touchdown per quarter.
This, of course, is especially depressing if we consider that the first four were with your franchise QB. We really are unable to place this at the feet of some “golly, we just didn’t have any injury luck” explanation.
The common links for this team right now are pretty clear. They are just horrendous on both sides of the line of scrimmage. We talked at pretty great length about how it seemed they were undermanned in both directions, but we didn’t expect it would go this poorly.
They are 31st (out of 32) in rushing and 31st in stopping the run. They are 31st in red zone efficiency on offense (touchdowns per trip) and 32nd in red zone efficiency on defense.
They are beaten up and don’t seem terribly full of fight.
One other statistic from last night’s broadcast was hearing Joe Buck claim that the Joe Mixon touchdown makes it 19 consecutive quarters where the opponents have scored on Dallas. Apparently, the second quarter in Pittsburgh was the last time the Dallas defense went 15 minutes in a game without conceding points. There have been only three such quarters in all of 2024 where Dallas put up a zero in a quarter defensively:
Looking at the offense, you can see they put up three scoreless offensive quarters last night. They are still looking for a first-quarter home touchdown this season. In fact, they hadn’t scored a home touchdown since Baltimore in Week 3 until the brilliant moment when Cooper Rush hit KaVontae Turpin for a 64-yarder last night.
These are many of the reasons why I find this all connected. It is difficult to find something new to say that hasn’t already been said about a team that is playing the exact same way, no matter what they try. Sometimes, blaming a strategy or a scheme loses sight of a much greater issue – they are just awful in too many ways to think there is a tactic that can change how mismatched they appear.
This, of course, is why I started sensing that a coaching change was coming back in September. That feels like the theme to the mismanagement of the offseason: they had a bunch of choices to make, and maybe the most important one was to either fire Mike McCarthy after the Green Bay debacle in a perfectly defendable decision or commit to him and let the players and coaches know that he is your guy with the biggest vote of confidence you can muster (most likely a contract extension).
This, by the way, would also have been defendable. I said as much in this piece from July 12th.
I ended that piece in July this way:
They did nothing.
So, as we sat through the New Orleans game and then the Baltimore game on consecutive weeks, I was sure they were about to fire their coach. This doesn’t mean it is all his fault. Rather, this is what you do to send the message to your employees that this is not acceptable, and since I cannot fire all of you right now, I am firing someone because you clearly want this by playing the way you are.
They did nothing.
Then, the Detroit game seemed to offer the same scenario. Is it effort? Is it incompetence? It might not matter when you lose to a team by 38 that you had beaten on the same field just nine months earlier.
They did nothing.
Then, in consecutive games, you get drilled by Philadelphia and Houston, games where your opponents and supposed rivals took over your stadium and didn’t even play that well. But it doesn’t matter because the home side can barely beat themselves. A combined 68-16 mismatch of the highest order.
By now, firing your coach almost seems pointless. What sort of bounce in enthusiasm would you gain at this point? The season is lifeless, and they again seemed to sabotage themselves with the indecision that has become the hallmark of this mismanagement team.
Now, they head to Washington to play against many old friends. Those friends, coaches, and players alike, must wonder what happened to this organization after they left town. When they left, this team had lost one playoff game to Green Bay. Surely, they never believed it would trigger a collapse the likes of which we have never seen.
Maybe they will offer a kind word of encouragement or a nice hug. And then, they will try to keep the collapse going by pounding the Cowboys by three or four touchdowns.
If only Dallas had any idea how to stop them. But they clearly don’t.
Houston Texans are the latest to destroy Cowboys in front of a defeated home crowd.
Bob Sturm
Nov 19, 2024
It is the same game. It is Groundhog Day.
I assume that this nightmare cannot continue forever because the Giants will visit AT&T Stadium in 10 days, and that should finally end the loop of indefinite sadness for the home fans.
Now, hold on. I am not promising a win. Nobody would be that insane.
But I am willing to submit to you that there should be competitive football on Thanksgiving Day. The odds of the very bad New York Giants coming to town and crushing the Cowboys in Dallas by three touchdowns or so seem rather unlikely.
Not impossible, mind you. Just rather unlikely.
So, that would mean the loop of indefinite sadness that the cameras catch over and over again should come to at least a temporary halt. You know, the ones where a Cowboys fan is decked out in his most eye-catching gear, only to look like he is starting to wonder why he pays so much money to make himself miserable. The crowd shots of bewildered and dismayed Cowboys fans are about the only way the television networks can get through the second half of another non-competitive football game in Dallas.
Because the Cowboys keep playing the exact same home game over and over again, and the patterns are pretty clear and obvious by now.
On Monday night, the Houston Texans became the sixth consecutive team to play at AT&T Stadium and humiliate the Cowboys in front of their home “loyalists.” I use that term loosely because the percentage of visiting fans who do not want to miss this opportunity to laugh at Jerry Jones in person is growing by the week. And, heck, the percentage of home fans who have had enough seems to be growing, too, if the signs and the booing from the various levels of the stadium are any indication.
The Texans were the opponent, and they have their own issues. But still, they were able to play a reasonably clean game with moments of brilliance and probably felt in total control from the moment Joe Mixon broke his first long touchdown run. They were never caught and certainly never trailed before winning a game by the largest margin of the season and allowing the fewest points in 2024, too.
Superlatives are reached when teams play Dallas this year. There is a matchup problem pretty much everywhere on the field, on both sides of the ball, that will not let up. Dallas has tried different things. Sometimes they have been conservative and careful; other times they have been crazy aggressive with poor gambles, and it doesn’t matter.
They simply stink at a level we are unfamiliar with. They are making us compare them to 1960, 1989, and yes, 2000. We have reached levels of despair that have almost no equal around here.
Even when they play reasonably well – relative to our expectations for Cooper Rush, the defense, or pretty much any part of this team – they still lose by three touchdowns or more. And now, it seems, the opponent is just a detail. Every opponent is too much for this team.
Below we find a lady in a Santa Claus outfit with a sign that says “All I want for Christmas is for Jerry to sell the team.”
That is a pretty big ask, lady, but I support your optimism.
This is where we are. It is impossible to describe how “down bad” this organization finds itself right now. But it is as low a point as I can remember.
The thing that makes you shake your head the most in disbelief is that we are talking about a football team that was good enough to win 70% of its games over a very long three-year sample and to win 100% of its games at home for almost two full seasons. The Cowboys’ 16-game winning streak was the longest in professional football since the Tom Brady Patriots won 18. They were an objectively good football team as recently as 2023, both in winning and dominating home games.
And yet, they are threatening to be listed among the worst home teams in NFL history if this continues much longer.
So, yes, these last 30 years have not been nearly as fun as the 30 years before them in Dallas Cowboys football, but I want to emphasize that this six-game home streak we are currently witnessing, which has stretched from January to November, is unlike anything we have ever seen. I swear.
Allow me to attempt to prove it – since I obviously don’t have a very good explanation for how this happened.
– This was from ESPN’s Todd Archer: The Cowboys have been outscored by 118 points in five home games. That’s the third-largest margin in a team’s first five home games of a season in the Super Bowl era. The fact that two teams in NFL history have done worse at home is hard to believe, but true. So, shout out to the 2013 Jacksonville Jaguars (-123) and the 1966 Atlanta Falcons (-119). Perhaps if we knew they were just one touchdown from all-time history, someone would have tried to make that happen.
– This was from The33rdTeam: The Cowboys have allowed 37.4 PPG at home in 2024. That would be the most PPG allowed at home by any team in a season in NFL history. The 1960 Cowboys currently hold this record (36.5 PPG allowed at home). Now, there are four more home games and a few of them are against very poor opponents, so we probably should not project them to break the record of the expansion Cowboys of 1960, but it is squarely on the radar as we approach Thanksgiving Day.
– According to Monday Night Football: The Cowboys have trailed by at least 20 points in six straight home games That is the longest streak in NFL history.
– According to Bobby Belt: The Cowboys have scored five touchdowns at home this season. The New Orleans Saints scored six in Week 2 and still have the most of any NFL team scored in this stadium 2024, unless you consider the fact Green Bay scored seven last January in the playoffs.
Those three factoids are different ways of reporting the same news. This Dallas Cowboys team went from a fringe pick for the Super Bowl as the 2023 Playoffs began to a team that will pick in the Top 10 and possibly make a run at the Top 5 in what appears to be the blink of an eye.
Obviously, as someone who spends all day and night covering this team and trying to keep a running commentary of its daily activities, I should have some reasonable explanations, right?
I should, but I would suggest that if I had seen any of this coming, I would have enough money to retire right now because I would have taken down Vegas with a projection that a team on a historical 16-game home winning streak could suddenly go six straight without being competitive in any of them.
It truly is the weirdest thing.
Here are the numbers. I thought we should show the point differentials (obviously poor), the turnover differentials (negative in every game!), and the rushing yardage differentials (negative in every game!):
That is negative 134 points, negative 13 turnovers, and negative 663 rushing yards in just six games – 110.5 yards per game on the ground.
Then we showed the point differential through the end of the third quarter to take out the garbage-time cosmetic points. They are down 129 points after the third quarter of each of these six beauties, which averages out to 21.5 points per game. Three touchdowns. Or, to make it worse, a touchdown per quarter.
This, of course, is especially depressing if we consider that the first four were with your franchise QB. We really are unable to place this at the feet of some “golly, we just didn’t have any injury luck” explanation.
The common links for this team right now are pretty clear. They are just horrendous on both sides of the line of scrimmage. We talked at pretty great length about how it seemed they were undermanned in both directions, but we didn’t expect it would go this poorly.
They are 31st (out of 32) in rushing and 31st in stopping the run. They are 31st in red zone efficiency on offense (touchdowns per trip) and 32nd in red zone efficiency on defense.
They are beaten up and don’t seem terribly full of fight.
One other statistic from last night’s broadcast was hearing Joe Buck claim that the Joe Mixon touchdown makes it 19 consecutive quarters where the opponents have scored on Dallas. Apparently, the second quarter in Pittsburgh was the last time the Dallas defense went 15 minutes in a game without conceding points. There have been only three such quarters in all of 2024 where Dallas put up a zero in a quarter defensively:
Looking at the offense, you can see they put up three scoreless offensive quarters last night. They are still looking for a first-quarter home touchdown this season. In fact, they hadn’t scored a home touchdown since Baltimore in Week 3 until the brilliant moment when Cooper Rush hit KaVontae Turpin for a 64-yarder last night.
These are many of the reasons why I find this all connected. It is difficult to find something new to say that hasn’t already been said about a team that is playing the exact same way, no matter what they try. Sometimes, blaming a strategy or a scheme loses sight of a much greater issue – they are just awful in too many ways to think there is a tactic that can change how mismatched they appear.
This, of course, is why I started sensing that a coaching change was coming back in September. That feels like the theme to the mismanagement of the offseason: they had a bunch of choices to make, and maybe the most important one was to either fire Mike McCarthy after the Green Bay debacle in a perfectly defendable decision or commit to him and let the players and coaches know that he is your guy with the biggest vote of confidence you can muster (most likely a contract extension).
This, by the way, would also have been defendable. I said as much in this piece from July 12th.
I ended that piece in July this way:
They chose not to commit in either direction. They chose to go to the intersection and just sit there while everyone honks at them to make a decision. Their indecision was their decision.
They did nothing.
So, as we sat through the New Orleans game and then the Baltimore game on consecutive weeks, I was sure they were about to fire their coach. This doesn’t mean it is all his fault. Rather, this is what you do to send the message to your employees that this is not acceptable, and since I cannot fire all of you right now, I am firing someone because you clearly want this by playing the way you are.
They did nothing.
Then, the Detroit game seemed to offer the same scenario. Is it effort? Is it incompetence? It might not matter when you lose to a team by 38 that you had beaten on the same field just nine months earlier.
They did nothing.
Then, in consecutive games, you get drilled by Philadelphia and Houston, games where your opponents and supposed rivals took over your stadium and didn’t even play that well. But it doesn’t matter because the home side can barely beat themselves. A combined 68-16 mismatch of the highest order.
By now, firing your coach almost seems pointless. What sort of bounce in enthusiasm would you gain at this point? The season is lifeless, and they again seemed to sabotage themselves with the indecision that has become the hallmark of this mismanagement team.
Now, they head to Washington to play against many old friends. Those friends, coaches, and players alike, must wonder what happened to this organization after they left town. When they left, this team had lost one playoff game to Green Bay. Surely, they never believed it would trigger a collapse the likes of which we have never seen.
Maybe they will offer a kind word of encouragement or a nice hug. And then, they will try to keep the collapse going by pounding the Cowboys by three or four touchdowns.
If only Dallas had any idea how to stop them. But they clearly don’t.
