Through five weeks, NFL football is once again demonstrating why it’s far and away the biggest sport in the country. The parity in the league rivals all others. With the Bills and Eagles each taking the L on Sunday, there are no more unbeaten teams, the shortest timeframe for that feat since 2014. With most games seemingly decided on final drives, an explosion in sudden momentum-shift plays like blocked kicks, fumbles, and deep shot receptions, along with the new kickoff and overtime rules, the product on the field is as good (or better) than it’s ever been.
Believe it or not, a prime contributor to the league’s entertainment value has been your Dallas Cowboys. Forever the team with the largest TV draw, this season’s version has been giving that massive viewership, whether they are cheering for or against the Silver and Blue, plenty to enjoy. Sunday’s absolutely dominant victory in the Meadowlands was against the hapless Jets — a team that’s been so consistently terrible for so long that even my decidedly non-sports-conscious wife was inspired to remark, “Why do the Jets always suck?” Through the first five weeks of the season, Dallas sits at an ice cream headache-inducing .500 record, thanks to the 40-40 tie (a tie?!) with Green Bay a week ago. A more appropriate record simply couldn’t be devised.
In a bewildering display of incongruent symmetry, the Cowboys have just been able to keep their heads above water in the NFC by managing to overcome a cataclysmically bad defense. New DC Matt Eberflus’ squad currently sits in the bottom third of the league defending the run (an actual improvement over recent years), ranks 29th in points against, and dead last in passing yards and total yards given up. On the flipside, the offense is Top 10 in rushing, Top 5 in points and points per game, Top 3 in completions, and No. 1 overall in receiving and total yards gained, all led by a quarterback in Dak Prescott who’s resurrected his 2023 MVP runner-up form and is even exceeding that previous high.
No amount of power-chugging even the strongest of Cowboys Kool-Aid would have had me convinced in June that I would be compelled to say a month into the season, “You gotta hand it to Schotty,” but … you gotta hand it to Schotty. It’s difficult to say whether the offensive juggernaut currently taking the field is due to Schotty’s schematic genius or Dak’s intergalactic level of play. Whatever it is, it’s accounting for the loss of six starters to injuries, including your top wide receiver and four positions along the offensive line. It’s likely a combination of both, the scheme and QB play, with each feeding the other, but whatever the reason, it’s working — well enough to the point that it has kept a defense in peril at every level from burying their playoff hopes before Halloween.
I obviously do not know what this portends. The Schotty offense has been able to mask some of the deficiencies of the shoddy defense, but that’s not sustainable throughout the course of the season if you have hopes for capitalizing on an MVP-caliber QB performance and want to make some noise come January. If “Flus” can even manage to rally the defense toward the middle of the pack, Dak and the O have proven they can keep the ’Boys in just about any game. To that end, the Micah Parsons-less D did show some improvement on Sunday, albeit against a bottom-dwelling opponent. The pressure against opposing QBs that seemed to leave with Parsons when he was shipped to the Packers on the eve of Week 1 exploded for five sacks on the mobile Justin Fields, more than doubling their season total to date in one game. As a result, the secondary allowed fewer splash plays, the dagger that killed them against the Bears in Week 3 and almost did so in Week 2 against the Giants and Week 4 against Parsons’ new team. Eberflus also employed more man coverage against the Jets, a much more comfortable scheme for the players he has to work with, which no doubt helped the secondary in coverage and in turn the pass rushers’ ability to get home against Fields.
If they can repeat this against Carolina next Sunday, it becomes a trend and can go a long way toward climbing in the defensive rankings. “Schotty-ball 2.0” has been a recipe for success on the other side of the line of scrimmage, so if they can marry that with even mediocre D and add on the already elite-level special teams Dallas has with kicker Brandon Aubrey and returner Kavonte Turpin, don’t look now, but the Cowboys might be a little frisky. If nothing changes, the games, if nothing else, would promise to continue to be entertaining.
