Philadelphia Eagles: How one play ended the Dallas Cowboys’ season
It looks like the Philadelphia Eagles have one less challenger for the NFC East.
When the Dallas Cowboys took the field for a Week 7 inter-division romp against Washington, they held their proverbial destiny in their hands.
Sure, the team spent the week enthralled in a brutal back and forth between the coaching staff and their players spurred on by the loss of franchise quarterback Dak Prescott, but surely the Cowboys, featuring the most prolific offense in the league, would be able to outscore a Washington club averaging a little over 16 points-per-game since their surprise win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 1, right?
Yeah, not so much.
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Playing their second game of the season with Andy Dalton in the starting lineup, the Cowboys entered FedEx Field a half a point back from the Eagles in the woefully underperforming NFC East, with their future completely in their hands. If they won the game, they’d hold a ‘commanding‘ lead over the Eagles in route to a shared Week 8 showdown on Sunday Night Football – assuming, of course, the league doesn’t flex it out to save football fans the world over from some less than stellar regional football.
And initially, the Cowboys were off to a pretty impressive start.
Despite boasting one of the worst defenses in NFL history, Dallas was able to stop Washington at the one-yard line. While that’s not where any team would like to start a drive, the Cowboys’ offense features one of the best running backs in the league in Ezekiel Elliott, so surely the team should have been able to leave their own red zone and march down the field on a fairly impressive Washington pass rush.
Fast forward six plays into the future, and the Cowboys found themselves on the wrong end of a weird, strip safety, down 0-2 on the second drive of the game.
That lead, literally the smallest possible number of points a team can score in the game of football, proved insurmountable for a Cowboys team known nationally for their explosive offensive scheme.
Okay, technically that isn’t correct. It actually took one more drive for Washington to completely put the game out of reach by the not-so-big score of 9-0 but didn’t it feel that way? While Dallas was able to pick up a field goal on their next drive, they never reached the endzone again and only made it into Washington territory two more times on seven tries.
But that wasn’t the play that sealed the Cowboys’ season and effectively turned the NFC East into a two-ish team race. No, that play happened with 6:31 minutes left to play in the third quarter.
Stuck in a 3rd-10 at their own three-yard line, Dalton dropped back, pump-faked, and took off running in a mad dash for a Dallas first down. Though the scramble wasn’t ultimately successful, as Dalton only made it to the 10-yard line, the play ultimately did result in a first down, but only due to a particularly brought on by a brutal hit by Washington’s journeyman middle linebacker Jon Bostic.
That, my friends, was the play that effectively ended the Cowboys’ season, but not because it swiftly sent Dalton into concussion protocol.
Sure, the Cowboys will be at a disadvantage without Dalton in on the field moving forward, as his backup, Ben DiNucci, finished out the game with more sacks than completed passes, but did you see what happened when the play was over (check it out here if you haven’t already)? Notice, if you will, that not a single Dallas player gets in Bostic’s face to defend their quarterback.
Watch it again; nothing.
Now sure, a few members of the team did go to check on Dalton, with the majority of the offensive line rallying around the player affectionately known as the ‘Red Rifle’, but isn’t it a bit odd that no one seemed particularly fired up over the objectively late hit. It’s not like the two teams didn’t scuffle it up here and there throughout the game either – I mean, this was an NFC East game after all.
From that point on, the Cowboys played like a 2-4 team with very little interest in putting in the hard work to dig out of their hole. They went through the motions, watched DiNucci run for his life against the likes of Ryan Kerrigan and Chase Young, and packed up for a flight back to the more temperate weather of the Lonestar State.
Next. Javon Hargarve has gone M.I.A. since joining the Philadelphia Eagles. dark
Could this analysis be wrong? Could Ben DiNucci become the next Gardner Minshew, or Andy Dalton, return in a few weeks with a newfound aggressiveness and a huge chip on his shoulder? Sure, who’d have ever thought the leading team in the NFC East would have a 2-4-1 record? But at this point, does anyone really believe this Dallas Cowboys team has that in them? Assuming the team drops an incredibly consequential game to the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 8, Jerry Jones may as well start planning for the 2021 offseason; an offseason that will surely be as rot with controversy as the first month and a half of the regular season has turned out to be.