A day of reflection makes the Cowboys loss to San Francisco feel all the more frustrating and empty.
The Dallas Cowboys are disappointing these days. As far as football operations and goals are concerned, they are a bad team and are boring on top of it all which only makes matters worse. Much of this all was predictable over the course of the offseason that they chose to do nothing during, and the constant pot-stirring and gaslighting from the front office only served to upset people in the process.
On Sunday night the Cowboys lost to a bitter rival in the San Francisco 49ers. It was the fourth loss in a row for Dallas that came at the hands of San Francisco specifically, two of which were infamously in the playoffs over the last handful of years.
This was admittedly not the stout version of the 49ers that dismantled the Cowboys in the past, but even still they had relatively no issue rising to the occasion and proving to be the better team in every single way. Expectations have fallen dramatically for the Cowboys around the proverbial water cooler so that they had a halftime lead (10-6, very strong) was enough positive shock for the night before everything unraveled.
We have all experienced tough times for the Cowboys before, but this specific level of chaos is not often reached.
Here are our thoughts about what we just saw after a night’s worth of rest, although that didn’t do much to change anything.
The losses always sting, but the passion involved feels so far away right now
It has been said a lot that the playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers broke Dallas Cowboys fans. These days it is hard to counter that.
Sunday’s loss was once again to a conference rival, and one that has owned the Cowboys for some time now. In the past when the Cowboys faced circumstances like that it seems like, we have embraced the challenge of the against-all-odds nature of it all. We relished in the opportunity to prove everybody wrong.
That passion, if you want to call it that, appears to be absent from even the Cowboys themselves right now. When they led San Francisco it was kind of fun but our worst fears were held near the front of our minds, not even at the back. As the 49ers poured it on it all felt cut and dry, like we were watching it from some sort of detached space.
Maybe you really did buy all the way in to the pseudo comeback, but it felt so impossible which was evidenced in the team’s win probability. According to NFL Pro it never got higher on the Dallas side than 5% throughout all of the fourth quarter.
The passion is absent right now. And that really stinks.
There is a lot of how we got here, but Dak Prescott has to be better
It would be difficult to count the number of words I have offered in Dak Prescott’s defense – that he is a quarterback of the franchise caliber which means he is worth paying the going rate. Of course the Cowboys should never have drawn contractual discussions out as long as they possibly could so that the price would be as high as it became. They should have swallowed their pride and get it done the moment that they could in the name of getting the best possible price.
But whatever the number is, the reality is that Prescott is paid the market rate among franchise quarterbacks, it just so happens that his number is the highest at the moment. He doesn’t have a proper surrounding cast at the moment, but all of that aside, he has been quite awful in his own performance.
Whether the Cowboys are paying him or not, and they clearly are, Prescott plays the quarterback position where the glory and blame are both different. He is a big reason why the team is in the funk that they are and acting carelessly with the football is one of the primary reasons.
Prescott has had a few interesting moments in terms of public discussion since training camp. While in Oxnard he noted that fans needed to let go of the failures of last year and said that it probably hurt the team more than it did anyone else. Following the loss to the Baltimore Ravens he challenged people to “jump off” (as in to stop supporting) the team if they wanted to at that moment in time. Consider that since then they are a .500 team with the two wins coming against two poor teams and the two losses coming in rather embarrassing fashion. Maybe the toll of being a Cowboys quarterback is, in fact, taking a toll.
Whatever the case, this season has hardly been Dak Prescott’s finest one with a star on his helmet. This is not helping that the cast around him is bad, or that the contractual situation with him reached the point that it did, and it is all existing in one horrible universe that we are trapped in.
Dallas Cowboys football hasn’t felt this Not Fun in a very long time
This is a serious question: When was the last time you had fun rooting for the Dallas Cowboys?
Maybe you say the season opener against the Cleveland Browns, but personally that day was pretty chaotic with the aforementioned Prescott contract happening just hours before kickoff.
If I had to truly answer when the last time was that I had fun I think that I would say the penultimate game of the regular season for Dallas in 2023, the last time we saw them win in their home building. That was the night that the Cowboys beat the Detroit Lions in controversial fashion, CeeDee Lamb set the individual team receiving records, and Jimmy Johnson finally went into the Ring of Honor.
It felt like all proverbial stars were aligning, even with the controversial ending. The Cowboys were being set up for the most opportune playoff run ever since Jimmy himself was on the sidelines, and pretty much everything from that moment forward has been a collective basket of Not Fun.
We are no longer early in the season. It is not Week 3. This week brings Halloween and the weekend will see the calendar flip to November while the clocks turn back. It is deep enough to have a strong opinion and the main one is that none of this is fun.
Can fun be re-established before it is too late? That feels unlikely.
We are stuck here. For the time being. And for some time after that.
