The McCarthy Chronicles: Same old song and dance for Cowboys after Saints loss
Has anything really changed in Dallas? Will it ever?
As Steven Tyler once so eloquently put it, it’s the same old story, same old song and dance. That’s how it feels right now for the Cowboys after getting completely embarrassed in their home opener by the Saints, who came into the game as 6.5-point underdogs.
The Saints scored a touchdown on every single drive through the first three quarters, and Mike Zimmer’s defense - which looked downright dominant in Week 1 - didn’t force a punt until halfway through the fourth quarter. All in all, the Cowboys followed up their blowout win on the road with a blowout loss at home to the tune of 44-19.
After the game, the comments from coaches and players all fell along the same line: this was a humbling experience, this will motivate us, we’ll get better from this. If it sounded rehearsed, that’s because it was. The Cowboys have formed a habit out of these games under Mike McCarthy: they get blown out by a team they should’ve beat, talk all week about how it’ll motivate them to play even harder next time, and then go out and score a big win the next week.
To be fair, the Cowboys do tend to respond well following a loss. Since 2021, the Cowboys have lost consecutive games just twice. In 2021, they followed up a loss to the Chiefs in Arrowhead with an overtime loss to, coincidentally, Derek Carr and the Raiders in a game that saw plenty of penalties both ways. Last year, they went 0-2 on their December road trip to Buffalo and Miami before ripping off two more wins to finish out the season and win the NFC East.
When the Cowboys do win after a loss, they tend to win big too. In such games, they’ve outscored their opponent 423-193. Perhaps that bodes well for the Cowboys’ matchup this upcoming week against the Ravens, who are a stunning 0-2 on the year so far.
That doesn’t make it any easier to stomach this loss, though, nor the way in which it happened. It had been discussed all week that the Saints attempted to revamp their offense this offseason by plucking Klint Kubiak off the 49ers coaching tree, a tree which has many branches in charge of offenses across the league these days. Most of those branches have enjoyed great success against the Cowboys defense.
This year felt different, though. Zimmer had a history of doing well against the Shanahan style offense. His unit had looked invincible a week prior against a Browns team that employs the same scheme. And Zimmer was familiar with Kubiak, who spent four seasons on Zimmer’s staff in Minnesota. On top of all that, the Cowboys had finally invested in some beef in the trenches, adding veterans Jordan Phillips and Linval Joseph in addition to Mazi Smith bulking up again.
That didn’t make a lick of difference. The Saints ran roughshod over the Dallas defense, and all those big bodies on the defensive line got shoved around repeatedly. This was the first real test of this new-look defense and whether or not it could stop the kind of offense the Cowboys will face in six weeks in San Francisco, something that is essentially a prerequisite for making it to the Super Bowl as an NFC team.
The result was a big, fat F.
The irony is that McCarthy’s offense actually played well against an elite Saints defense. They scored 16 points in the first half, one of eight teams to score that many in the first half this week. All the other teams to do so were leading at halftime by an average differential of 13 points.
Things fell apart for the offense in the second half, as McCarthy was forced to become one-dimensional and Dak Prescott was forced into gotta-have-it scenarios, which rarely turn out well for quarterbacks. It wasn’t a perfect day of offense, by any stretch, but McCarthy’s unit was not the reason this game was lost.
That’s perhaps the scariest part of it all. The modern day NFL is a quarterback-driven league, and usually the team with the better quarterback wins. Most of the time, the Cowboys will have the better quarterback, regardless of what the talking heads may lead you to believe. But even on a day when Prescott flirted with 300 yards against a defense that’s allowed 300+ yards just twice in the last two seasons, the Cowboys were unable to win or even keep things close.
The fact that it came against a Kyle Shanahan disciple - of which there are many across the league - and that this scheme was the defense’s undoing begs the question of whether anything has changed at all for the Cowboys. More importantly, will it ever change? If the Cowboys still can’t stop this offense, they’ll for sure lose in Week 8 this year when they face Shanahan himself, and they’ll for sure lose in the playoffs when they run up against Shanahan or Matt LaFleur or even Kubiak and the Saints.
That sobering reality may be setting in for the Cowboys now. A bounce-back win over the Ravens would feel nice, but it still won’t answer any questions about stopping this kind of offense. And until that question gets answered, the ceiling for this Cowboys team remains low.
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