In the second quarter of their game against the Cowboys, the Atlanta Falcons faced fourth-and-3 from the Dallas 36-yard line. What played out once Kirk Cousins got the ball snapped to him was a pristine example of two interrelated statistical probabilities coming true at the same time. The Cowboys' pass defense allows the most yards per attempt in the NFL, and had given up the second-highest number of plays of 40 yards or more even before Trevon Diggs tore a muscle in his calf. Falcons wide receiver Darnell Mooney, meanwhile, leads the NFL in receptions of 20 or more yards. As three Cowboys defenders bumbled into each other, with Diggs raising his hands in disbelief, Mooney ran into a pasture of space and sauntered in for an easy touchdown.
That play was one of the many embarrassments suffered by the Cowboys as they lost, 27-21, and fell to 3-5. Their year is less than halfway over and they already have as many losses as they had in each of the past three seasons. The football Mike McCarthy's team is playing has him smashing tablets on the sideline, Ezekiel Elliott is only nominally on the team, and they have to play through a brutal schedule without several key players, including possibly Dak Prescott. The NFL's highest-paid player hurt his hamstring on a run in the third quarter and was quickly taken out of the game, leaving Cooper Rush to see out the loss. After three losses in a row, things are suddenly looking dire.
The most significant problem facing the Cowboys is that everyone is hurt, an unfortunate bit of bad luck that Dallas made themselves especially susceptible to when they duffed their offseason. Prescott and CeeDee Lamb signed new deals late in the summer (in Prescott's case, in the final hours of the offseason), while the team punted Micah Parsons's extension talks to next summer. They were quiet in free agency, signing Elliott to replace Tony Pollard and Eric Kendricks to replace the retiring Leighton Vander Esch, though several key players left without the Cowboys making serious moves to make up for the talent drain. The theory of the team was that the defense would once again kick ass, while Prescott-to-Lamb would remain explosive enough to offset the downgrade at running back.
The stat that tells the story of how significant of a downgrade Elliott is from Pollard has neither player's name on it: When Prescott rushed for 22 yards in the second quarter against Atlanta, he notched Dallas' first 15-yard run of the season. Elliott has mostly been bad, though he didn't even bother to show up this week. He was a healthy scratch for the first time in his career, with the NFL Network's Jane Slater reporting that, "Aside from habitual tardiness, he’s missed three team meetings."
Prescott will have an MRI on Monday to determine the severity of the hamstring injury, and if he misses time, the team is truly sunk. Cooper Rush is not a terrible backup, though the 5-1 record he has a starter is more of a reflection of how good the Cowboys were in 2021 and 2022 than his talent as such. Prescott said he "felt something I've never felt" when he pulled up lame, but even before he went down, he was up against it. The Falcons' pass rush came into the game with the worst stats of any unit in the NFL, notching only six sacks in eight games. They piled up half of their season total on Sunday, and they made life hard for Prescott even when they didn't nail him. The 2.2 air yards Prescott managed per target in the first half is the second-lowest of any half in his career, which is an alarming stat to put up against a unit who was so bad against the worst team in their division that their head coach compared Andy Dalton to Michael Vick.
The gravitational pull of a .500 record is immense, and the Cowboys are experiencing how difficult it is to be good for multiple years in a row. If you have a quarterback who is good enough to be paid $240 million, you are going to win enough games to consistently run into a difficult schedule, and do so with a roster composed largely of players on rookie contracts. The better you get, the thinner your margin for error becomes, and while Jerry Jones has made a big deal about going all in, there is only so much latitude any team has to improve after three straight 12-win seasons. This is not to say the Cowboys couldn't have done anything this summer, or that Prescott wasn't worth keeping around, but that they were in no position to weather the injury crisis they've been in this season. The only ways to survive such a scenario is to have a superstar quarterback or a generational coach, and Dallas now has their signal-caller hurt and Mike McCarthy on the sidelines.
