Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys will have to bounce back from a historically ugly Week 2 loss against the Saints. Thankfully, we’ve them do it before.
The only positive from the Cowboys’ Week 2 loss to New Orleans is that it’s over. While the Saints may have raised plenty of red flags about Dallas on both sides of the ball, it’s still just a single game in September that can be forgotten with better days ahead. Over the last few years since Mike McCarthy became head coach, the Cowboys have found themselves in this position more than once.
While none were as demoralizing as what happened this past Sunday, Dallas has had some ugly September losses the last couple of seasons. In fact, they’ve been 1-1 after two weeks in four out of the five years since McCarthy arrived.
We won’t even get into 2020; between it being McCarthy’s first season and the toll of the pandemic, the early-season results are skewed. Dallas did go 1-1 to start the year but then lost two more before Dak Prescott’s Week 5 injury, so it was just a funky outlier of a season that doesn’t really aid analysis.
In 2021, the Cowboys opened with a dramatic loss on the road to Tampa Bay. Dak Prescott and Tom Brady dueled to the end, with Brady doing his legendary thing to engineer a last-minute drive for a game-winning field goal. It was a good loss for Dallas, if you believe in those things, against the reigning Super Bowl Champions. They’d go on to win their next six games on the road to one of those 12-5 seasons we’ve grown accustomed to.
Dallas would again lose a season-opener to the Buccaneers in 2022, but this one was not even close to being a moral victory. At home against a much lesser Tampa team, the same one that went 8-9 and got destroyed by the Cowboys in the playoffs, Dallas lost 19-3 with complete ineptitude offensively and defensively. Like Alvin Kamara this past Sunday, Bucs RB Leonard Fournette went off for 137 total yards on 23 touches. But despite how badly that game went, Dallas would recover with a four-game win streak and another 12-5 finish, then got revenge on the Bucs in the first round of the postseason.
Last year the bad loss didn’t come until Week 3 but it still happened, this time at the hands of the Arizona Cardinals. Dallas had steamrolled soft New York competition the first two weeks in the Giants and Jets, winning both by a combined 70-10 score. But overconfidence wasn’t so much the issue in Arizona as injuries; Trevon Diggs suffered his season-ending injury earlier that week and Dallas was also without Tyron Smith and Zack Martin on the offensive line. The Cardinals, despite having career backup Josh Dobbs at QB, took advantage and embarrassed Dallas 28-16. But as you know, once again, Dallas handled that humiliation and posted their third-straight 12-5 record.
So what does this even mean? Each year is different and you can only put so much stock in trends from season to season. But as Cowboys fans are desperately looking for hope after what transpired on Sunday, perhaps this offers some modicum of comfort. If the win over Cleveland boosted our expectations too high, don’t let this loss drag them too low. The true caliber of this Dallas team is probably somewhere in the middle.
Granted, after that terrible home playoff loss to the Packers and an offseason widely criticized for its seeming lack of urgency, pessimism is understandable. Some went into this season without much hope, so Sunday’s loss may have felt closer to validation.
Wherever you fall on this emotional spectrum, the Baltimore Ravens are headed to town with a chance to either lift spirits or crush them further. If they deliver another haymaker, it could mean this season isn’t heading in the typical direction of the last three. If the Cowboys bounce back with an impressive home win, maybe it’s a sign that the New Orleans loss was more of an anomaly than a harbinger of doom.
One game doesn’t define a season, at least not until mid-January. Just as those September losses in past years didn’t typify the team’s performance, this last one could go down as just another early-season oddball. For now, Dallas is 1-1 with its whole 2024 life ahead. But it may not take long, even as soon as this coming Sunday against Baltimore, for even the more conservative of us to start reaching for the panic button.
