The Dallas Cowboys Are A Mess
By Kim Dunning
The Dallas Cowboys are a mess. There is no nice way to put that after the 0-4 pre-season. While taking stock into pre-season games isn’t necessarily the most intelligent route to take and really we’ve seen teams go 4-0 in pre-season and have an awful regular season. The NFL is fickle and unpredictable, however, after seeing the 4 pre-season games from the Cowboys, they are quite simple a mess. Pre-season is about finding new players and depth on your roster and practice squads but the showing of inconsistency was abundant in the 4 Dallas Cowboys pre-season games. Quite frankly, before pre-season optimism was tangible, after pre-season it’s going to be a long season!
So you are probably wondering why I consider the Cowboys a mess. It’s easy to determine. Throughout pre-season there were times you just had to cringe. It’s like “groundhogs day” over and over again. It is the same issues, same problems and no adjustments and the same stupid mistakes. Take the pre-season statistics for example, in 4 games, the Cowboys had 1 count them 1 rushing touchdown and that was running back hopeful Ryan Williams. The Cowboys also only had 7 touchdowns total in 4 games scored by Jamar Newsome, 2 by James Hanna, Dez Bryant and LaRon Byrd. With the way the defense has been playing, and mind you, as bad as the defense was last season, they are predicted to be worse this year, and 7 touchdowns in 4 games isn’t going to put wins in the win column. It’s going to have to be touchdowns that win the Cowboys games this season because they cannot rely on the automatic Dan Bailey to dig them out of holes this season.
Not to mention that the penalties in the NFL have gone up as a whole this pre-season which doesn’t bode well for the Cowboys who are among the higher penalized teams in the league. Way back when Jason Garrett first accepted the position at head coach he promised fans that this team, HIS team would be more disciplined on and off the field. News flash, Garrett, it hasn’t worked. While the Cowboys have gone down, not significantly to count, Garrett has a lot of work left to do with this team. Stupid drive killing penalties are going to continue to become an Achilles heel for the current Dallas Cowboys.
The defense of the Cowboys well there isn’t enough words to convey the feeling the majority of Cowboys fans felt after watching the last four games. It isn’t a vast improvement and the depth is still lacking significantly and the younger players are having a difficult time adjusting to the NFL, Ahmad Dixon, is a good example of this. Not even into the regular season and getting dinged by the NFL for a hit. While the passion is nice to see, it goes back to the above paragraph and back to the undisciplined practices.
If this pre-season is an omen to the rest of the season, it’s going to be a long painful season. The last time the Dallas Cowboys went winless in the pre-season was 2000 and they ended up that season 5-11. It doesn’t set well when even owner and general manager Jerry Jones stopped believing this is his Super Bowl team and with his reality in check finally admitted that this team has a very hard up-hill battle. For Jones to admit that it’s just easier to say, hold onto your hats Cowboys fans, this is going to be one of those years! The good news is we can play for good draft picks, oh wait, that doesn’t even go well for Dallas anymore!