Things couldn’t have gone much more wrong for the Dallas Cowboys early on Sunday. Throughout the week, the line makers, the media and the fan base all felt that Sunday was going to be an exclamation on an incredible first half of the 2021 season. The team had just proven they were good enough to win on the road with a backup quarterback who hadn’t started a game before in his entire career. They were matched up against a club who dominated bad teams but were dominated by good ones to this point in the season, the 4-4 Denver Broncos.
The line crept up to double-digits. Dallas averaged a 40 burger in their three home wins thus far. The game started with a 54-yard Tony Pollard kick return and though Dallas failed on a fourth-and-1 run they should’ve checked out of, things still looked bright when the defense apparently carried over the momentum from Minnesota, making the Broncos lose yardage on both first and second down before an incompletion completed the three and out. After that, though, the rest of the early afternoon was all downhill and Dallas found themselves trailing 30-0 midway through the fourth quarter. An embarrassing lowlight of a performance threatened to break a 30-year streak of scoring at home, before two garbage-time scores. The Cowboys fell to 6-2 and saw adversity in the mirror for the first time this campaign.
But not to worry, the football gods gave them a reprieve with the rest of Sunday’s action. Here’s a look at how most of the other important results from Week 9 kept Dallas’ self-inflicted damage close to minimum.