In some ways, the Cowboys are exactly who you think they are. Against Philadelphia, then against the Tommy DeVito Giants, they showed it again.
They destroy the bad teams, and lose to the good ones. These last two games have been perfect microcosms of who the Cowboys are. They intend to be the good bad team in the NFL, and they play like it.
Going back to the Philadelphia game, the loss, like every other Dallas loss to a good team, can be pinned on the coach and/or quarterback.
The coaching staff decided to go slowly when the Cowboys could, realistically, have got themselves two good possessions (which they ultimately were able to do, almost by accident).
The quarterback took two sacks the two separate drives, both on critical first downs. The second one, taken with 21 seconds left after the ball was snapped at the 11 was like casting Sofia Coppola in The Godfather 3: unrecoverable.
Quarterback and coaching staff combined for Prescott’s decision to throw a stop route to Jalen Tolbert on fourth and game. CeeDee Lamb had 11 catches for 191 yards on 16 catches and Jake Ferguson had 7/91 on 10 targets and looked wide open, yet you go to Jalen Tolbert from South Alabama on fourth and game lined up against second-team All-Pro James Bradberry.
Yes, Lamb was doubled, but the Cowboys made it easy to double him because of how static their offence is. When he saw the double, Dak’s went straight to Tolbert as the X-receiver. He didn’t pay attention to the matchup.
That play was microcosmic. You couldn’t help but notice how much better, man for man, the Eagles were than the Cowboys. The weight of talent was too much, even with Dak playing one of the best games of his career.
You reel off the names of the Eagles: Hurts, Brown, Kelce, Johnson, Mailata, Smith, Bradberry, Slay, Byard, Carter, Cox etc and you’re looking at stars everywhere.
You compare it to the Cowboys who have the 7th or 8th best quarterback, one star receiver, one superstar pass rusher, and a few ageing offensive linemen. You can feel the difference, in the same way you can feel the difference between the Giants and Cowboys.
And this isn’t an issue of the Cowboys not drafting well. While Jerry Jones is the GM in name, Will McClay is the key day-to-day decision maker, and is excellent.
All of the stars on the Cowboys’ roster have been drafted by the Cowboys.
And that’s where we get to the conceit of this piece.
What happened to the Cowboys who won by spending? It’s not like oil money has dried up. It’s also not as if Jerry Jones is an Osage who has his spending controlled.
When they signed Deion Sanders, the greatest cornerback in NFL history in his prime, from the San Francisco 49ers in 1995 (two years after the cap was brought in largely to combat Jones outspending everybody), they signed him to a deal where he was paid the league minimum against the cap. How did that make sense?
They gave Deion a massive signing bonus and low salaries in the first three years. Jones invented the process where teams convert cap hits into bonus cash to lower the cap charge and give themselves more flexibility.
To combat this, the NFL introduced a rule where the renegotiated bonus still has to count against the cap but can be prorated over a number of years to soften the blow.
How are teams using that very mechanism this year? Very effectively.
Baltimore, Cleveland, the Jets, Buffalo and Houston are all above $270m in cash spending, in a year where the cap is $224.8m.
Of the top 10 teams in cash spending, 7 came into the season expecting themselves to be contenders and weren’t delusional in the thought.
The Giants, given the contract they handed the now-injured Daniel Jones, may have considered themselves to be contenders but that was some Kendall Roy style delusion.
The other two outliers are Houston, who are only there because Laremy Tunsil is heading to the sports business hall of fame and they had the second and third picks in the draft who commanded big bonuses, and New Orleans who need a whole separate column.
Who isn’t in the top 10?
The Cowboys.
They sit 13th in cash spending, behind the famously cheap Bengals, and Dolphins.
Of all the contenders, the Cowboys are the cheapest by cash spending other than Kansas City who get to play a different game because they have Patrick Mahomes.
They spend like the good bad team.
You can feel it in the Cowboys’ receiver corps. They have nobody outside of Lamb, pending the Jake Ferguson breakout.
There’s a reason it was Jalen Tolbert on fourth and game.
Beyond just the money against the cap, it’s the coaching staff. Their head coach and offensive play-caller Mike McCarthy is one of the less inspired offensive minds in the league.
McCarthy is a west-coast zealot. The west-coast offence is static, built on a short-to- intermediate, timing-based passing game that’s based more on execution than scheme.
Offence has since moved on significantly.
The genius of Kyle Shanahan, Ben Johnson and the like is that the scheme is the star. They get players open with motions, shifts and route combinations. Obviously, it works better with better players, but there’s a reason Jimmy Garropolo in San Francisco was one of the most efficient quarterbacks of all time, but in Vegas he was the worst in the league.
The scheme gave him easy buttons to push.
A big reason why Aaron Rodgers was so upset at the end of the Mike McCarthy era in Green Bay was because McCarthy didn’t give Rodgers any easy buttons (and McCarthy wasn’t a big Rogan guy). Everything was hard because it was so execution dependant. Instead of scheming his guys open they had to win, and eventually as Green Bay’s talent got less and less, the receivers won less often.
Dallas is facing a similar issue. Only Lamb wins consistently, and McCarthy can’t scheme anything easy for the other players.
Even though Dan Quinn is an expensive defensive coordinator, generally the Cowboys have changed.
Their image is one of glitz and glamour. Opulence. But it’s no longer true. The Cowboys pinch pennies.
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