It’s a brand new season. We’re just starting out. Lots of new faces. A revamped coaching staff. We got out to a slow start. We had a shortened training camp. There were no preseason games. We’re still getting on the same page. It takes time. Still getting up to speed. That team pays their players, too. Every game in the NFL is a battle. Any given Sunday. Blah blah blah.
The honeymoon in Dallas is officially over. Although an opening-day loss to the Rams could be chalked up to growing pains, and the next week’s win over Atlanta could be called a fluke, and the Week 3 result in Seattle could be forgiven as a close loss to a superior team, there seems to be a far simpler explanation for the utter disaster that played out in Arlington against Cleveland on Sunday. Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence summed it up quite aptly.
“In my own words, I call it soft,” Lawrence told reporters during a postgame conference call.
Soft, indeed. The Dallas defense let the Browns literally run all over them, allowing 307 rushing yards on the day, the highest total in franchise history. And that wasn’t even to Cleveland’s top ground threat, Nick Chubb; he left before halftime with an injury.
The Browns’ leading rusher on the afternoon? Undrafted free agent D’Ernest Johnson. An AAF refugee. A guy who, as the Fox broadcast team breathlessly mentioned several times, was working on a fishing boat while waited for a break with a team.
On Sunday, he gashed Dallas for 95 yards on 13 carries, an average of 7.3 yards per attempt.
“You give up 300 yards rushing, that’s just poor,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said in his remarks after the game. “That’s poor run defense. There’s no way around it.”
The whole McCarthy era in Dallas is off to a historically poor start. The Cowboys defense has given up 146 points through four games, the most since the team’s first year in existence, a season the expansion club went 0-11-1.
As flat-out bad as the defense was in the Week 4 outing, McCarthy was ready to shoulder much of the blame for the team’s dreadful 1-3 start as he addressed the media after his first career loss at AT&T Stadium.
“It ultimately falls at my feet,” McCarthy said. “It’s my responsibility. The application of details did not exist today in certain spots of the game. There was a lot of good football that will totally go unrecognized. That’s what happens when you lose. What I don’t like is the pattern of the four games that we’ve played. The points are outrageous, time of possession is totally lopsided, and we’re minus-seven in the turnover ratio. That’s not a winning formula.”
New defensive coordinator Mike Nolan will be the subject of heavy- and deserved- criticism from fans and media this week, but McCarthy sounds like a man determined to stick with the current game plan on that side of the ball.
“We’re in a scheme change from the prior scheme here, and we’re not off to a good start,” McCarthy admitted. “The worst thing we can do is narrow everything down and be a one-call defense. I refuse to do that. That’s not the path. We have a defense that fits our players.”
Lawrence brushed off questions about the defensive scheme.
“It’s not my job to think about what’s right or what’s wrong [in term of scheme]. My job is to go out there and try to make as many plays [as possible] to help my team win the game. I don’t feel like I’m doing that right now, and I’ll get back to it.”
Over his four-minute Q&A session with reporters, the two-time Pro Bowler repeatedly came back to his original assessment of the Dallas defense.
“We came out of the gate soft. In different words, I could call it something else. It’s just all about having some grit, playing balls to the wall, going out there and giving it everything you’ve got.
“We’ve got to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ve got to play together as one, and I don’t feel like we’re holding ourselves accountable, including myself. I call that [expletive] soft.
“We’ve just got to do a better job preparing and really come with our full hearts in the game, play this game for 60 minutes straight. It’s just all about throwing down and really showing that you’re a real man out there and playing together.
“Growing up and playing like real men out there, and not like kids. We’ve got to attack people before they try to attack us. I feel like we’re doing a lot of catching, and we’re going to get better from it.”
A flawed scheme that doesn’t maximize the players on the roster is one thing. Lawrence questioning his defensive mates’ toughness, heart, and grit points to a far more troubling and deeper issue.
Turning the ship around will require a new level of effort from both players and coaches. Lawrence suggested that perhaps too many people thought overhauling the staff was all it would take for the Cowboys defense to suddenly become an elite unit.
“If you think you’re going to sit here and get a whole new coaching staff and win every game and shoot for the stars, you’ve got a big surprise coming,” he explained. “That was our surprise. We’ve got so much talent. But without that grit, without that toughness, talent don’t mean nothing in the NFL. It’s all about us coming together, figuring it out, and getting better from it.”
That process starts- once again- on Monday. McCarthy has expressed satisfaction with how the team prepares during the week, but the guys who show up on Sunday wearing the Cowboys’ uniforms sure haven’t looked ready to play at a high level.
“You’re always prepared,” the coach said. “But at the end of the day, there’s a difference between being prepared and how you perform.”
Agreed. And now, four rough weeks in, things like benefit of the doubt, grace periods, excuses, and time are already running out for McCarthy, his new staff, and his defensive players.
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