Well, that was … strange.
After boat racing their first two opponents to the tune of a combined score of 70-10, the Cowboys were controlled by a team actively attempting to tank its season. The Arizona Cardinals are not a good football team; they were, in fact, predicted to be historically bad this season. Of course, any given Sunday, and all that. The Cardinals have been in every game they’ve played thus far, and they deserve respect. They probably have the Cowboys’ after yesterday.
Then again, yesterday was not about the opposition. Yesterday was about the fact that Dallas employs a quarterback making $40 million a year, and they can’t put the ball in the end zone.
I didn’t put much weight on last week’s red-zone woes, or the conservative play-calling in general. They felt like a byproduct of the way the game unfolded. But we are now three weeks into the season, and Dak Prescott has the second-lowest average depth of target out of 34 quarterbacks with at least 50 attempts, ahead of only Colts rookie starter Anthony Richardson. This offense has backed itself into a corner where threatening the defense deep is simply not an option.
Prescott is 27th in the average time he is delivering his passes. He is 25th in the percentage of his passes that are thrown short of the sticks. I could go on, but you get it. In trying to walk the fine line of efficiency and risk, the Cowboys have effectively turned Prescott into the dreaded bus driver that many of us feared he might ultimately become.
It is worth noting that Dallas brought a patchwork offensive line into the contest yesterday. Tyron Smith, Tyler Biadasz, and Zack Martin were all out with injuries. My guess is you didn’t know the name “Brock Hoffman,” who filled in at center, until yesterday. And while the replacement unit wasn’t great, they weren’t awful. Prescott was sacked twice, and the pressure was certainly limited by the game plan of getting the ball out quickly. But this was the plan last week as well, when the offense was really only down one spot on the line.
Yes, wide receiver Michael Gallup finally enjoyed a bit of a breakout game, with six catches on seven targets for 92 yards. And, sure, the officials did him no favors by picking up a flag on what appeared to be a clear pass interference against him in the end zone late in the fourth quarter. Dallas was trailing by 12 at that point; maybe this is a different game if the Cowboys get that call and then get into that end zone.
But there is not a world where it makes sense for the Cowboys to blame the referees—or any extenuating circumstance—in a game against the Arizona Cardinals. Nobody understood that better than Gallup, who had this to say regarding that call, per The Athletic:
“When you come into somebody else’s house, you know you’re going to be playing against the refs and the other team, regardless. Of course, we’re the Dallas Cowboys so ain’t no getting those calls. It is what it is, got to play through them. … That was a tough one. He didn’t even play the ball. He never turned around. It is what it is. Like I said, you playing against both of them. Just got to overcome.”
It was a bad call, but it should not have been a critical call. For whatever reason, an offense with highly drafted, highly compensated receivers simply cannot seem to get things moving through the air. And that’s a problem, because that’s the name of the game in 2023.
Does Mike McCarthy believe that Prescott is incapable of leading anything more than a ball-control offense? Right now, that’s the way it looks. For context, Prescott was 13th in the NFL in average depth of target last year; he ranked 19th in average time to throw. This is, without a doubt, a clear change in how his offense is operating. He has a nice deep ball, and the Cowboys are simply refusing to let him throw it much.
My concern is that Prescott tying for the league lead in interceptions last year has spooked not only him but the coaching staff into a different approach. In many cases, the defense will do enough to get the ball back and destroy the opposition’s game plan, and this conservative approach will be fine. But a few times a year, the offense must create some opportunities beyond simply taking what is there. Yesterday was one of those days, and Dallas appeared largely incapable of doing so.
In the backdrop of all of this, of course, is the fact that Prescott is due a massive contract extension sooner rather than later. And he’ll get it, too. There is no doubt about that. But it would certainly be a lot easier to swallow if his offense wasn’t appearing next to Zach Wilson’s Jets in red-zone touchdown percentage.
It’s tempting to write this off as merely one game. Arizona had been counted out, fought hard for the third week in a row, and got a win playing at home. The Dallas defense certainly had a down day, too, getting gashed on the ground up the middle. And it will be easier to examine how this team plans to play offense when they aren’t down three starting offensive linemen.
But Prescott is expected to be in the tier of quarterbacks who can make four or five plays a game against a bad team that paper over injury issues and unfavorable whistles. Yesterday he wasn’t that. Over the next month or so, we’re going to find out if this was an aberration or if his coach simply has decided he isn’t “that” guy. If he’s not, it doesn’t matter how great the defense can be each week. This team has a ceiling, and that ceiling is well short of a Super Bowl contender.
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