Cowboys have troubling soft spots 3 weeks into NFL season, and team ownership is to blame

Late into the night on Sunday, the sea of discontent was washing over the Dallas Cowboys.

They’d suffered a somewhat embarrassing 28-25 loss to the Baltimore Ravens at home, in a game that wasn’t really much of a fight until the final half of the fourth quarter. The defense had been flattened for an absurd 274 rushing yards. The offense had been largely toothless most of the night, undermined by a scheme that is struggling to find balance between an atrophied running game and inconsistent passing attack. All bonded together by a cast of players who appear to have lost interest in masking their frustrations.

You could see it in the face of quarterback Dak Prescott, who was captured on video side-eyeing reporters as he walked to the Cowboys’ locker room — declaring to seemingly everyone in earshot, “Jump off if you want. Please. Please, please, please.”

You could also see it in the disappearance of wideout CeeDee Lamb, who absence in the locker room was noted by multiple reporters on social media. Later, you could hear it in the voice of head coach Mike McCarthy, who navigated his way through clichés about Dallas needing to look “straight into the mirror,” being “a work in progress”, and needing “to clean our own house.” Right about that time, McCarthy’s predecessor with the Cowboys, former head coach Jason Garrett, was wielding a sharper edge on the pregame show of NBC’s Sunday Night Football, doling out eyebrow-raising criticism that effectively labeled Dallas as being soft.

“Everybody understands this about the Cowboys now,” Garrett said. “They’re not a physical football team — we have to go in there and run the ball. The last two years they were dominant at home. [But] I think teams have found a formula. Run the ball, get ahead. That’s what silences that pass rush. The Ravens controlled most of the ballgame because they handed the ball off [and] dominated the line of scrimmage.”

This is not a chaotic rough patch the…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-09-23 05:00:41

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