The Dallas Cowboys have reminded us how fun football can be over the last week.
The Dallas Cowboys have increased their win total on the season by 66% over the last handful of days. When you put things in those terms, it is pretty wild to think about. The Thanksgiving game itself and the one preceding it are a two-fer that can dramatically inflate or wreck a season if things go one way or the other. With Dallas winning their two games, both of which were within the division, a breath of fresh air has arrived and it smells like the holiday spirit.
Something we like to do around here is take a look at the game that just happened to the Cowboys after a night’s worth of rest to let it all properly marinate. Maybe this week brining is a more appropriate way to think of it. Whatever the case, this week it is the day after the day after thoughts.
Here are our day after the day after thoughts following the Thanksgiving Day win over the New York Giants.
Football feels fun for arguably the first time this season
It is one thing for your favorite football team to be bad. We have been living that for quite some time. But it is an entirely different thing to be Not Fun, to drive people to apathy. Unfortunately we have also been experiencing this for some time relative to this team.
The wins over the last week in no way undo the sins that bore themselves out over the course of this entire calendar year, but experiencing back-to-back wins throughout the course of Thanksgiving week surely put some sort of smile on faces.
These two wins have seen Cooper Rush get a little hot, Luke Schoonmaker score his first touchdown, KaVontae Turpin return his first touchdown (in amazing fashion), the Cowboys deny Dan Quinn and keep the Commanders at bay, the glorious Thanksgiving Day uniforms, a 100-yard rushing performance from Rico Dowdle, DeMarvion Overshown going wild and Micah Parsons rallying the troops. I’m sure I am forgetting something else that is important.
Football has felt fun over the last few days and we now get to begin our holiday season with that magical feeling in the air of playoffs as a potential possibility. Is it a far-fetched one? Of course, nobody is denying that. But the positivity that the team has generated felt like a fire they were incapable of starting quite literally just one week ago. They have made fire and we shall dance around it like Tom Hanks in celebration.
It is absurd how long it took for the team to commit to Rico Dowdle
Rico Dowdle has 198 rushing yards in his last two games played for the Cowboys. If that sounds like a lot to you it’s because it is.
That is actually more rushing yards than any Cowboys running back has had in a two-game stretch since Tony Pollard did over two years ago. It is not a coincidence that this two-game stretch features the most carries from Dowdle than any other this season which certainly begs the question as to why it took so long for that to firmly be the case.
Was it truly the Cowboys holding on to the past with a favorite player of theirs? Were they not ready to trust Dowdle as much as they have been lately? It seems hard to believe that anyone who evaluates football on a professional level could have believed that any world other than the one where Dowdle is the featured player out of the backfield was one worth exploring.
Dowdle is getting the lion’s share now and that is ultimately what matters most. But it certainly calls into question the how and why we got to this point in the name of decisions like that never happening again.
Cooper Rush really has had quite the Dallas Cowboys career
Cooper Rush has now officially started 10 games at quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. These have come across three different seasons as it was a lone game in 2021, five in 2022 and the last four here in 2024.
The Cowboys are 7-3 in these games! Once upon a time the franchise quarterback missing time due to injury was an absolute death sentence for the Cowboys. Consider that when Tony Romo missed 12 games in 2015 that the team won a single one of them and it took all of their might to do so on the road against Washington.
Mike McCarthy has had to make lemonade out of a situation without Dak Prescott under center in four of the five seasons that he has been this team’s head coach and he has managed to win games each and every single time. Obviously McCarthy is not perfect in those circumstances, but it is not realistic or practical to expect people to be.
Back to Rush though. We are talking about someone who first joined this team as an undrafted free agent way back in 2017 and hung around long enough until the Jason Garrett era ended. Mike McCarthy understandably changed things around a bit and ultimately the team brought Rush back which led to everything that we have seen from him since.
Rush’s path is certainly one that is less traveled than most, but he has absolutely turned into a verifiable reserve quarterback who you can turn to on a moment’s notice. The most truthful thing that the front office seems to have offered lately is that he gives the team their best chance to win games relative to any other healthy quarterbacks on the roster.
Kudos to Rush for always being a good soldier and executing to the best of his abilities. 70% of the time, a very respectable percentage, it has been enough.
This Thanksgiving, we are grateful.
