There were some bad losses on Sunday — New Orleans getting thrashed by Washington, Seattle coming up short at home against Arizona, Green Bay suddenly forgetting how to run a functioning offense for 55 minutes while hosting Detroit — but was the Cowboys losing to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers maybe the saddest of them all? I don’t know. That would require one to feel some sort of empathy for this pathetic season Dallas has put together, and that’s probably all but impossible given the current circumstances.
For the Cowboys, what continues to plague them in a non-football sense is the most violent, abusive and ill-tempered circumstance of them all, one Greg Hardy, who has been a net-negative in both football and life. His contributions in Tampa Bay amounted to a single tackle and a moment when he was openly trying to taunt the fans inside Raymond James Stadium. His continued employment remains a mystery, although his teammates, by all public accounts, support his presence in the locker room and on the field. If you’re looking for reasons why this Cowboys team resembles some marketing department creation specifically designed to assemble the most unlikable sports team ever devised, look no further.
As painful as these last few weeks of football have been — Dallas is 0-5 since Hardy came back from his suspension — the season effectively came to an end with the final passing play of Sunday’s loss. With a deep ball to the end zone, Matt Cassel did a reasonably effective job of getting into the range of Dez Bryant’s reach from about 55 yards out. Bryant didn’t hold up his end of the transaction, choosing to essentially give up on the play once he felt the slightest touch of a hand on his shoulder from Bucs third-year safety Bradley McDougald. Bryant is taller, has much muscle, and is more experienced than McDougald. Maybe he was banking on some benefit of the doubt. And yes, there was contact from McDougald and his hand perhaps pushed Bryant’s upper body in a given direction. But there was absolutely no fight from Bryant to catch that eminently catchable ball. The ball had not even come to rest and Bryant was lobbying for a pass interference call. He gambled that the refs would go for his theatrics, they did not, and the Cowboys lost, 10-6. Not a single touchdown against the team that just picked No. 1 overall.
At 2-7, the Cowboys are now dead-last in the NFC East by two full games. Their negative-48 point differential is fourth-worst in the conference, ahead of only the three other cellar-dwellers. And yet, on a statistical level, the Cowboys are very much the mirror opposites of their opponents:
First downs
Dallas: 188
Opponents: 188
Third-down conversions
Dallas: 40/109
Opponents: 41/110
Total offensive plays
Dallas: 560
Opponents: 560
Passer completions
Dallas: 199
Opponents: 199
Beyond all that somewhat creepy consistency, the Cowboys are actually possessing the ball seven minutes more a game than their opponents. But their existence this season seems to be predicated simply on trying to match their opponents on a one-for-one basis, and it’s not working out great so far. With injuries, dysfunction and controversies all simmering to a boil on a weekly basis, the Cowboys don’t even have hope of breaking through in a feeble NFC East, where the .500 Giants are in first place and eight wins could take the division.
And now, the Cowboys are mere percentage points ahead of the Cleveland Browns (2-8) for the worst record in the entire league. They’re tied with four other woeful teams at 2-7, but by virtue of their high strength of schedule, they would pick seventh in the upcoming draft if the season somehow mercifully ended today. And whether Tony Romo should even come back and play once he’s deemed healthy enough to do so becomes a little bit of an open question, because Dallas almost certainly isn’t playing for anything this year, and a few meaningless wins at the end of the season would only further damage its draft standing.
From a realistic standpoint, there could even be some doubt whether the Cowboys win another game even if they’re putting forth their best effort every week. They’ve now lost four in a row since the Week 6 bye (which must feel like years ago to them), and here’s how the schedule stacks up down the stretch:
@ Miami (4-5)
vs. Carolina (9-0)
@ Washington (4-5)
@ Green Bay (6-3)
vs. Jets (5-4)
@ Buffalo (5-4)
vs. Washington (4-5)
That’s four teams with winning records, two apiece at home and on the road. Miami is playing like a better team than the one that fired head coach Joe Philbin after a 1-3 start. Maybe the Washington games are the only ones truly in play, but that’s a team that just annihilated a talented Saints squad by a 47-14 margin. A 2-14 year is not, by any means, inconceivable. That would make this the third-worst Cowboys season ever, just barely better than the 1-15 team in ’89 and when they won zero games in their inaugural season back in 1960.
But no matter where Dallas ultimately ends up in the standings, this will be a year worth forgetting in pretty much any respect you care to consider. This is an exhausting team to dissect, and I’ll gladly leave the offseason postmortems to someone else. But these Cowboys, here and now, are quickly becoming one of the most depressing footnotes in recent NFL history. Regardless, only seven more games to go and we need never speak of this debacle again.
