Tag: 2021 season week 10

Dan Quinn ‘taken aback’ by Cowboys’ game ball after Falcons win, already looking ahead to Chiefs

Dan Quinn doesn’t like to look back, but after getting the game ball for the win over Atlanta, admitted, “Didn’t know I needed that.” | From @ToddBrock24f7

Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn talks a lot about “being where your feet are.” It’s his way of reminding his players- and himself- to stay in the moment, to not get too hung up on where you’ve been or what’s happened in the past, and to not worry too much about what may be to come down the road.

For seven excruciating days, Quinn’s feet were firmly planted in a week where the focus in Dallas was largely on him. His unit had just been torched by a mediocre Denver squad, and their first chance at a bounceback would just happen to come against the team Quinn coached as recently as last year.

So when the Cowboys smacked Atlanta around on Sunday in as decisive a win as any Dallas fan in a generation can recall, suffice it to say no one was happier to turn the page than Quinn.

“I’ve probably never been as excited to end a week and start a new one,” Quinn told reporters this week at The Star. “I love being right where I’m at- right where my feet are- and I try to stay there. So last week was tough, to have everyone want to go take a trip back down Memory Lane. More than anything, I just love being in the moment, right where we’re at, week-to-week, and staying in it. Definitely glad to get rocking again this week.”

The defense’s dominating performance was impressive to watch. That it came against the club that axed Quinn after just five games in 2020- and barely three seasons removed from a Super Bowl appearance- added the kind of emotional significance that’s usually reserved for the movies.

Sunday’s script ended with a 43-3 exclamation point and Quinn being given the game ball.

“I was totally unprepared for that. And it meant a lot. I would say when you get fired mid-year, it’s hard. You’re embarrassed, you’re pissed,” Quinn admitted. “But, man, what a good feeling to know that there’s a whole army of people that got your back.”

“It was a very cool moment,” Quinn continued, “one that I was taken aback by.”

The moment made a splash on social media in the wake of the statement win. Quinn may have seemed speechless in the moment, but the 51-year-old who’s prone to lacing his vocabulary with four-letter words says he found a few choice ones right after that clip ended.

“I don’t think you guys saw what I said after; I’m pretty sure that’s why it was cut pretty quick,” Quinn shared. “The clean version: I’m so darn excited. And they’re some really tough guys. We’ll leave it at that.”

Quinn’s players confirmed that the coordinator didn’t treat the week of prep any differently. He, by all accounts, stayed right where his feet were.

“I don’t even think Q worried about the Atlanta Falcons,” rookie linebacker Micah Parsons said. “I think Q just wanted to come out here and punch somebody in the mouth after last week. It was the first week I ever saw Q’s face turn red at practice. I think this meant more, him being here for the Cowboys, than it meant him trying to get some type of agenda against Atlanta.”

“Anytime you go out there and have a performance [like that], it doesn’t matter who we play,” noted cornerback Jourdan Lewis. “It feels good.”

But facing a former team- one that he built, one where he still has friends and players he’s close to- does mean something different, whether Quinn admitted it out loud or not.

“It was personal. We knew that Monday,” defensive end Dorance Armstrong explained. “We just went out there and executed the game for him.”

“He didn’t even talk about it,” cornerback Trevon Diggs said of Quinn and the highly-anticipated rematch. “But we kind of read each other’s minds. We know what’s going on.”

“He should have a Super Bowl,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones commented on Dallas radio Tuesday. “He really should have a Super Bowl. But I’m not only proud for him, but I’m proud we got him. It’s contagious for the team. It was poetic for him to come in there beaming, into that dressing room after the game, to have basically put a plan together that was as effective as it [was] against his old team.”

“To be honest with you, he downplayed it to everybody,” said head coach Mike McCarthy when asked about Quinn’s rematch with the Falcons. “He didn’t even talk about it. I just think that it was obvious and obviously it meant a lot to him after the fact. We needed to win on a lot of fronts, so it was great to recognize him with the game ball.”

Quinn’s dramatic and sudden turnaround of the worst defense in franchise history will make him a popular name when coaching jobs start to come open around the league in a matter of weeks. But no matter where Quinn’s career takes him, Sunday’s game ball will have a special place on his mantel.

“I haven’t asked him where it’s going,” team executive vice president Stephen Jones laughed in a radio interview Monday, “but I know the whole team was so fired up for DQ. He’s got such energy, and certainly he wasn’t at all pleased with the week before, how we played. As I said, it was an across-the-board loss for our team the week before, and I know, probably more importantly than even beating the Falcons, was to come back and clean up a really subpar performance in terms of what we did not only as a team but, obviously, his area on defense.”

And now Quinn can get back to being where his feet are, which is prepping for a trip to the always-daunting Arrowhead Stadium to face the AFC’s representative at the past two Super Bowls.

The motto around the Cowboys facility after the Broncos beatdown was, “Spaceships don’t have rearview mirrors,” which is another way of wording Quinn’s mantra. That philosophy will come in handy again this week; holding Matt Ryan to a career-lowest passer rating in Week 10 certainly won’t mean a thing in Week 11 when the defense has to line up against Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs.

“One, they’ve got an excellent scheme and unique ways to feature players: deep routes and screens; they’ll work the whole field horizontally and vertically, so you’ve got to defend everywhere,” Quinn said of Kansas City’s offense. “And then the second element, against mobile quarterbacks: first play begins, and then, ‘Okay, I’m going to get outside the pocket,’ and they’re exceptional at throwing the ball down the field on the run. And so I think with this quarterback, wherever he is on the field, he can get it to somebody, and has that kind of strong arm to do that.”

The Chiefs rank third in the league in passing yards per game and fourth in total offensive yards per game. Much of that yardage tends to come after Mahomes starts improvising and extending the play.

“We’ll have to be exceptional in our- we call it ‘plaster’- when the second play begins,” Quinn continued. “We’re going to have to be outstanding at that part. Now, fortunately for us, we do a lot of that against our offense with Dak and Kellen and the guys. That’s a big piece of it, but you can’t ever take that for granted. Those six or eight plays that happen in a game where the quarterback is outside of the pocket- maybe start as a quick throw, and then, man, this is going to be a six- or seven-second play.”

The Cowboys defense will need to stay in the moment- especially when Mahomes prolongs the moment- this Sunday. And even though Quinn will have already moved on long past his Falcons game-ball moment by then, he admitted that his new team’s big win over his old team may have helped ground him even further in the here and now.

“Coaches, you know, they throw a lot of clichés out about adversity, and I would say most of them are really true, I think. But anyone who goes through adversity, I think you’d also know it stings a lot. What I probably realized maybe after the game: all week, I said our defense needed to recapture our style and our identity about how we love to play. I think probably afterwards, in the locker room, I probably realized how much I needed to be a part of that win, too. To be part of it, it felt good. And to hear Mike do that and the team have my back, that was a great feeling. I probably didn’t know I needed that, but to be honest with you, I probably did.”

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Cowboys’ Nahshon Wright on this week’s block recovery, ‘This time, it was behind the line’

Nahshon Wright had his hands on a blocked punt for the second straight week. This time, the ball bounced the rookie’s- and Dallas’s- way. | From @ToddBrock24f7

The Cowboys’ Week 10 game versus Atlanta was seen as a chance to make up for what went wrong the week before. But one key moment was practically an instant replay for rookie cornerback Nahshon Wright.

Last Sunday, Wright was the victim of a bad bounce and a seldom-seen rule on a blocked punt, inadvertently giving the ball back to Denver with a new set of downs. Seven days later, the Cowboys special teams unit broke through to block another punt, and the aptly-named third-round draft pick once again found himself in just the Wright place at just the Wright moment.

“Great play by D.A. [Dorance Armstrong, who made the block], and again, I was able to see it get blocked. This time, it was behind the line of scrimmage, going towards the end zone,” Wright told reporters after the decisive 43-3 win. “I just jumped on it.”

The 23-year-old out secured the ball in the end zone, giving him his first career fumble recovery and his first career touchdown all in the same moment.

“I made sure I got in the end zone,” Wright told reporters, adding that it was his first time scoring since his freshman year at Laney College, the junior community college he attended before transferring to Oregon State as a sophomore.

It seems like the simplest thing, grabbing a loose football. But funny things can happen when that oblong starts ricocheting off moving bodies and solid turf. Had the ball bounced just a little differently last week, Wright might have scored then, too.

“The ball was coming my way, and I’m at the line of scrimmage,” Wright said last Sunday after being unable to find the handle on a Week 9 punt blocked by Malik Turner. “I know shouldn’t have touched it, but I was trying to scoop and score and make a play.”

The Broncos recovered that ball, and since Wright had touched it beyond the line of scrimmage, Denver was awarded possession along with a new set of downs. And the early-third-quarter moment that might have turned the tide in the rout of Dallas merely prolonged the carnage.

“No fault at all,” Turner said then, after the 30-16 Week 9 loss. “It’s all on us, and we’ll be in that position again, and it will go our way next time.”

He had no idea the “next time” would come almost exactly 168 hours later- and to the same teammate- as the Falcons attempted to stop the bleeding by flipping the field, down 28-3 as the first half was set to expire.

Armstong, in his first start for the injured Randy Gregory, burst through the Atlanta line and got to punter Dustin Colquitt’s foot almost before the football did.

“That was my first one ever,” Armstrong said of the block, “so I was pretty excited, pretty surprised. But it felt good.”

Not as good as it felt for Wright as he saw a chance to atone for his previous muff, simply by doing what he’s been doing in practice.

“Just making sure I know exactly what I need to do,” Wright explained. “Coach Bones [special team coordinator John Fassel], he encouraged me to continue to try to make plays so that way, something like this today, I’m not afraid to go and try to make a play. It was great to be out there and make that play today.”

Wright’s recovery and score capped a huge day for the Cowboys secondary. Three different defensive backs intercepted a throw, and the group logged 10 passes defensed while holding Atlanta to just 131 air yards and keeping them out of the end zone as the Cowboys completed a blowout win of their own.

“We talk about our group; we want to be a special group, on special teams or whenever we’re out there on the field. The DB’s are going to go out and represent what we stand for. I was happy for [Wright],” cornerback Jourdan Lewis said. “He stayed in the moment, he made the play. He wasn’t worried about last week. He was just worried about making the play.”

For Wright, though, that one play wasn’t just another rep.

“That might be up there. It felt good to get in the end zone.”

It had to feel even better since he had to wait a week to get there.

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‘Hit them in the mouth:’ Cowboys’ fast start leads to all smiles (and a face bruise for Dak Prescott)

Dak Prescott led the Cowboys to their biggest win in 2 decades, but the hardest hit he received on the day came from his own wide receiver. | From @ToddBrock24f7

In Week 9’s debacle against Denver, it took the Cowboys nearly 56 minutes of game play to put their first points on the board. Seven days later versus Atlanta, it took just barely three.

Dallas came in eager to prove last week’s blowout loss was an anomaly. They did that- and then some- in delivering a 43-3 beatdown of their own over the visiting Falcons. Demons were exorcised, monkeys were shaken off of backs, bad tastes were washed out of mouths, and by the time the final whistle blew, the Cowboys had re-established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the NFC.

Following last week’s game in which nearly everything went wrong, head coach Mike McCarthy’s squad was desperate to string together some early success in Week 10. In trying to help the team get back to themselves, McCarthy actually began the afternoon going against his own instinct.

After winning the opening coin toss, the Cowboys elected to start on offense for the first time this season.

“Prefer to defer would be my tendency, but this was purely a focus,” McCarthy told reporters in his postgame press conference. “We wanted to get out there, jump out front, and get the lead. Let our defense play with the lead was the intent.”

Mission accomplished. Quarterback Dak Prescott led the offense 73 yards in eight plays, ending the drive with a 13-yard pass to wideout CeeDee Lamb.

The score was just 7-0, but a message had already been sent. The ‘Boys were back.

“I feel like the tone was already set from the moment we walked in the building,” Lamb said after the win. “I feel like, together, we came in with the right mindset and right game plan and just came in and attacked the day.”

Ezekiel Elliott, as usual, expressed things slightly more colorfully.

“We want the ball; we want to hit them in the mouth first,” the running back explained. “We wanted to go score first and that’s what we did.”

Wide receiver Michael Gallup, returning from an seven-game absence, agreed that a quick opening touchdown was crucial in helping Dallas turn the page from last week.

“That’s a big boost, especially when you get the ball first like that,” remarked Gallup, who wasted no time logging his first catch since Week 1 on that opening possession. “For the defense, just to see it, they come out fired up. We’re fired up, ready to get the ball back again. We definitely need it. We need to come out here and play fast from the start.”

The Cowboys did indeed, racking up 29 points in the second quarter alone, the highest single-quarter point total in franchise history.

Prescott connected with 10 different Cowboys receivers along the way, finishing 24-of-31 for 296 yards and a pair of touchdown throws. And that was in just three quarters; the Cowboys had a 40-point lead going in to the final frame, and No. 4 was a spectator from that point on.

But the sideline view allowed him to more fully put last week’s embarrassment in perspective.

“Last week just wasn’t us, and everybody in that locker room knows that,” Prescott told the media Sunday. “It left a bad taste in our mouth. I think it was a taste that we needed, as I said, to understand how tough this game is. But tonight just showed that when we focus in, we take it one play at a time, when our heart and minds are where our feet are, we’re capable of doing some great things.”

The offense did plenty of great things, allowing zero sacks, dominating time of possession, going 5-of-5 in the red zone, topping 40% in third-down efficiency, and converting all three fourth-down tries on the day.

“It felt like us. We got back to the basics, and that’s the kind of offense we are,” said offensive lineman Terence Steele, making his second straight start at left tackle in place of Tyron Smith. “This is how we play, and this is what we should put on film [from] here on forth.”

If it seemed as though the Cowboys played most of this Sunday with a Bronco-sized chip on their shoulder, McCarthy didn’t dispute it after taking out a week’s worth of frustrations on Atlanta.

“Well, it’s part of it,” the coach admitted. “I think the most important thing is you are able to learn from all of your experiences, and you have the opportunity to pay it forward, and I think as a football team, we did. Seven days ago we didn’t like where we were when I was standing up here. That was the response that we needed, and our guys did a hell of a job.”

The Denver loss wasn’t just about a lack of points or poor stats. The Cowboys- most troubling of all- lacked physicality for most of the Week 9 nightmare, and that was something the offense sorely needed to recapture.

So perhaps it shouldn’t have been a shocker when the Cowboys, already nursing a 36-3 lead in the closing seconds of the third quarter, kept the offense on the field on a 4th-down play at the doorstep of the Falcons’ end zone rather than let new kicker Lirim Hajrullahu attempt his first field goal.

Prescott ended up scrambling. And despite having gained enough yardage for a fresh set of downs, the quarterback threw himself into an Atlanta defender at the goal line. Add a late push from Steele, and the Cowboys leader drove the final nail in the Falcons’ coffin with six hard-earned points.

“I had to re-establish some toughness,” Prescott said later as he talked through his thought process during the improvised run. “At that point, I was actually getting ready to dive and just didn’t want the ball to go off a guy’s leg or something like that and realized I had the defender squared up. And at that point, yeah, it’s goal-line. I told you guys earlier in the year: certain plays, certain positions on the field, I’m going to go back to my instincts and [I’m] going to get the touchdown or the first down. But being smart about it.”

Elliott, who had two rushing scores in a 14-carry outing, was watching from the backfield as his quarterback put himself in harm’s way for the team’s last touchdown.

“I saw. I mean, Dak’s a big dude; those DBs are a little smaller. Maybe don’t want him doing that when we’re up 40,” Elliott laughed in his postgame reamrks. “I said something, joking, to him, after that drive. What do you expect him to do, one-on-one on the goal line? You’ve got to go get the touchdown. That just shows the type of quarterback that we have, it shows the type of the leader he is. He’s going to leave it all out there.”

Turns out, though, the goal-line hit wasn’t even the hardest shot Prescott took on the afternoon. Cowboys players were so amped up about reasserting themselves that the quarterback was left with a bloodied face after an earlier sideline encounter with one of his own receivers.

“After the second touchdown to CeeDee,” Prescott shared, “I come off the field, put my helmet down, then I see CeeDee coming past me, so I give him a holler, tell him ‘good job,’ and I guess he thinks I have my helmet on, so he leans in to do the the helmet tap. Face mask to cheek. I’m all right. I’m tough.”

That he is. And so is the entire Dallas roster, as they reminded the league on Sunday. But Prescott swears that following up a humiliating loss with the club’s largest margin of victory in over two decades wasn’t about making a statement to anybody but the men inside their own locker room.

“I don’t know if I’m necessarily into the whole ‘trying to make statements.’ We’re just trying to continue to get better and take it game by game, and when you’re in the game, play by play. I think when we do that, we’re capable of accomplishing whatever we want. We’re not going to get overconfident again.”

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Cowboys’ Tyron Smith must practice Saturday to play Sunday; Terence Steele set to repeat at LT

If Smith’s ankle keeps him out, Terence Steele will start again at LT after 6 games at RT. “It’s like trying to write with your left hand.” | From @ToddBrock24f7

Tyron Smith’s availability for Sunday all comes down to what he’s able to do on Saturday.

The Cowboys left tackle is in extreme danger of missing his second straight game with bone spurs in his ankle. While he has not taken part in practice this week, Dallas head coach Mike McCarthy isn’t ready to rule out the seven-time Pro Bowler quite yet. On Friday, he told reporters that he wants to give Smith one more day.

“If Tyron doesn’t practice [Saturday], he won’t be available,” McCarthy said. “That’s kind of the timeline that we’re on.”

Backup Terence Steele assumed Smith’s role in practice this week for the Cowboys, taking all the first-team snaps at left tackle ahead of Sunday’s home game versus Atlanta.

For Steele, it would mark his second straight outing there, after six consecutive starts on the opposite side. He took over at right tackle for the entirety of La’el Collins’s five-game suspension, and played well enough that the team left him there in Week 8, Collins’s first game back on the active roster. Smith left that game early and hasn’t played since. Cowboys coaches then moved Steele to the left side to cover for Smith and had Collins resume his usual spot at right.

The undrafted Texas Tech product struggled last week against Denver on the left side, but says he is more comfortable at the position after another week of practice.

“It’s like trying to write with your left hand. The biomechanics of being on the left is a lot different,” Steele told media members this week. “Hands, feet, eyes. Like, it’s everything.”

The second-year man said it required a completely different mindset to switch sides. And if he’s called on to go versus the Falcons, he says he’ll be ready.

“I just took a different approach this week of my angles and my sets. I think last week, I was trying to make it too much like my right. It’s just different.”

And it turns out the 24-year-old has a pretty good mentor trying to teach him the finer points of the role.

“He’s always in the background watching me,” Steele says of Smith. “Every walkthrough, I know he’s there keeping me– whatever he sees, he’ll correct me.”

McCarthy explained that the club hopes Smith’s ankle issue can be rehabbed back to playing strength but admitted that, when it comes to a possible surgery, “I think you look at all the options.”

For now, though, Smith’s short-term options are simple: practice Saturday, or keep watching Steele in his place on Sunday.

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Cowboys’ McCarthy on Gregory’s injury: ‘He’ll attack the rehab;’ Cedrick Wilson also to miss practice

Gregory will miss multiple weeks with a calf strain; WR Cedrick Wilson has a shoulder injury that will keep him out of 2 straight practices. | From @ToddBrock24f7

The list of Cowboys players unable to participate in practice keeps growing with just 72 hours to go before the Falcons come to town for a Week 10 matchup.

Obviously, the biggest bombshell dropped during head coach Mike McCarthy’s Thursday morning press conference was the calf injury that will sideline defensive end Randy Gregory for “multiple weeks.” The injury- deemed a calf strain after an MRI late Wednesday- occurred during the one-on-one portion of that day’s session, despite the veteran already taking a lightened number of reps.

Gregory had been thrust into a brighter spotlight along the Dallas defensive front, thanks to the foot injury that has kept edge rusher DeMarcus Lawrence off the field for all but the season opener. Gregory has responded and is currently the team leader in pressures, QB hits, and hurries. He’s also tied for the team lead in sacks.

“Clearly one of our best players on defense,” McCarthy raved. “Very disruptive. Our team and our defensive players feed off of his activity. He’s having a heck of a year, but he was back in here this morning . He’ll attack the rehab just like he has attacked everything else.”

While the team has not placed Gregory on injured reserve, McCarthy confirmed for reporters that it remains a possibility. In the meantime, it’s next man up for end Dorance Armstong, himself recently returned to active duty after an ankle injury.

“Dorance is back, so [his participation] will increase,” McCarthy noted. “How we rotate the third and fourth spot, we’ll see how it shakes out Sunday.”

One possibility? That rookie linebacker Micah Parsons slides up to see snaps at defensive end, just as he did in Week 2, when Lawrence was first out and Gregory showed up on the Reserve/COVID list.

McCarthy responded with a sly grin when asked if that may be in the cards. “Game starts at noon Sunday. Don’t be late.”

The team also announced Thursday that wide receiver Cedrick Wilson will miss the day’s practice, marking the second day in a row he will have sat due to a shoulder injury.

Wilson has been the team’s fourth-best receiver in terms of yardage and ranked second in yards per reception. Additionally, he’s returned punts and even played a key role in the occasional gadget play, averaging 5.5 yards on two rushes and completing both of his pass attempts for 57 yards through the air. He’s proven himself to be a valuable and versatile weapon with wideout Michael Gallup rehabbing from his a calf strain he suffered in the season opener.

Gallup has been back at practice this week and is expected to make his return to action on Sunday. The Dallas coaches will be very conscious of how much playing time Gallup and Wilson both get now.

“I think Michael will hit his stride,” McCarthy said in his press conference. “You’ve just got to be smart how much you use him. We’ll see how the rotation goes: obviously, Amari [Cooper], CeeDee [Lamb], and Ced. We were obviously being smart with Cedrick yesterday. Just really, how we work out the reps will be the biggest part. I don’t envision Michael being held back any.”

Looking down the rest of the roster, offensive tackle Tyron Smith will remain a non-participant with his ankle injury, and kicker Greg Zuerlein is still in COVID protocol. Running back Corey Clement and rookie defensive tackle Quinton Bohanna will miss Thursday’s practice, both with non-COVID illnesses.

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Greg Zuerlein still in doubt; Cowboys to re-sign Lirim Hajrullahu

The Kosovo-born kicker was the Cowboys’ safety net in the preseason and again after Greg Zuerlein’s misses in Week 1. | From @ToddBrock24f7

For a guy whose job can be measured in threes, Lirim Hajrullahu is hoping the third time’s a charm in Dallas.

The Kosovo-born kicker is being signed by the Cowboys, according to Michael Gehlken of the Dallas Morning News. It will mark the third time in less than 90 days that the specialist has been inked to a deal by the club.

News of the signing makes regular kicker Greg Zuerlein even more doubtful for Sunday’s home date against the Falcons. Zuerlein was placed on the Reserve/COVID list on Tuesday, and head coach Mike McCarthy confirmed reports that Hajrullahu would be one of two kickers given a tryout following Wednesday’s practice session to potentially replace him.

Brett Maher, the team’s kicker for 2018 and most of 2019, is said to have represented himself well during the audition. But after going 12-for-12 and being the team’s previous safety-net option- both during the preseason and again after Zuerlein struggled in Week 1- Hajrullahu will apparently once more suit up wearing the star.

Hajrullahu, a former CFL All-Star, booted two extra points in the team’s third preseason game versus Houston in August, but got no field goal chances. He was cut once Zuerlein had fully rehabbed from offseason back surgery.

But after Zuerlein missed a pair of field goals and a PAT in the season opener against Tampa, Hajrullahu was brought back onto the practice squad as insurance. Zuerlein went on to connect on all four of his kicks in Week 2, including the game-winning field goal as time expired; Hajrullahu was released two days later.

Zuerlein has not been ruled out for the Week 10 game as of yet, and McCarthy expressed optimism that he’ll be able to clear COVID protocols in time to play.

“Still hopeful Greg can hopefully, you know, potentially be ready,” McCarthy said during a Wednesday press conference. “I know it’s against the odds, but we’ll see how it goes.”

All signs, however, point to Hajrullahu making his NFL regular-season debut on Sunday.

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Cowboys coaches wary of Falcons TE Kyle Pitts: ‘He’ll definitely be a focal point for us’

The Cowboys have shown themselves to be vulnerable to a feature tight end. Kyle Pitts has shown himself to be that and more for Atlanta. | From @ToddBrock24f7

The Cowboys coveted Kyle Pitts in April’s draft, just like most every other team in the league. They did their homework on the Florida tight end, but quickly came to realize that Pitts would be unlikely to fall out of the top several spots. The Dallas brain trust was right; Pitts was selected fourth overall by Atlanta, the highest-drafted tight end in history.

So far, he’s living up to expectations. Pitts leads the Falcons in both receiving yards and yards per reception. His 546 yards place him among the top 25 pass-catchers across the entire NFL after nine weeks, and he’s currently moving the sticks for Atlanta on two out of every three receptions.

Now it will be up to the Cowboys’ retooled defense to slow down the talented rookie when he comes to town on Sunday. Head coach Mike McCarthy intimated on Wednesday that, as the team looks to bounce back from their Week 9 nightmare, the big 21-year-old might actually be the piece of the Falcons’ offensive puzzle that he’s most concerned about. So the staff dug out their research materials from spring, paying particular attention to film clips in which some of the cornerbacks the club was eyeing then squared off against Pitts.

“We actually went back and looked back at some of his tape- when the corners that we were watching and [Pitts were] back in Florida- for some of the potential matchup opportunities,” McCarthy told the media on Wednesday. “Obviously, he’s a feature player in their offense. He’s a challenge for matchups. Particularly, they don’t use him a whole lot in-line. It’s more open formations and situational football, how they’re trying to get him the ball. We have a lot of respect for the young man’s talent. He’ll definitely be a focal point for us defensively.”

Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn was able to watch Pitts’s final season of college ball in real-time after he was let go by the Falcons in early October 2020.

“I got a chance to watch some SEC last fall,” Quinn told reporters this week, before noting what stood out to him about Pitts: “The length and the speed. When you can throw away- say you had leverage on me to this side and I can throw so far away- that gives a guy like Matt [Ryan, Falcons quarterback] a good opportunity to know where the leverage is and put the ball far enough away that it can’t get defended.”

Quinn admitted that Pitts’s 6-foot-6 size poses a real problem and makes him especially tough to defend for defensive backs and linebackers who are almost universally quite a bit shorter.

“Here’s a guy who’s got this great length and size,” he continued. “When you can throw away from somebody’s leverage, you can throw it a little further away and don’t have to be as tight of a throw, whereas somebody who’s small and compact, it’s almost 50/50. Having a guy with leverage and real length, that’s a big factor.”

It’s easy to look at the Falcons roster and think that with wide receiver Calvin Ridley out, the Cowboys can simply devote more coverage resources to Pitts. But there’s still the dangerous running back Cordarrelle Patterson to watch coming out of the backfield. And not having Ridley on the field hasn’t necessarily made life harder on Pitts; he snagged nine balls for 119 yards and a score in the first game that Ridley missed this season.

The Cowboys have proven to be somewhat susceptible to attacks from the tight end position. Using fantasy stats, Dallas ranks in the bottom ten when it comes to keeping tight ends’ numbers down. Sure enough, rare has been the week when an opposing tight end (or TE platoon) didn’t end up doing a fair bit of damage- in catches, yardage, or points- against Quinn’s unit.

Week Tight End Tgt Rec Yds TD Avg
Week 1 Rob Gronkowski, TB 8 8 90 2 11.3
Week 2 Jared Cook, LAC 5 3 28 0 9.3
Week 3 Ertz/Goedert, PHI 11 6 119 1 19.8
Week 5 Engram/Rudolph, NYG 5 5 69 0 13.8
Week 6 Hunter Henry, NE 2 2 25 1 12.5
Week 7 Tyler Conklin, MIN 7 5 57 0 11.4

Dalton Schultz, Dallas’s own tight end, has suggested that teammate Jayron Kearse might be uniquely well-equipped with handling his Falcons counterpart during Sunday’s game, based on what he sees in the Cowboys’ practice sessions. The thinking is that Kearse’s speed and rare 6-foot-4-inch height would help slow down the versatile Atlanta phenom, who frequently, as McCarthy pointed out, also lines up as a traditional wide receiver.

Quinn says that multitasking aspect of the league’s new crop of playmakers will make defending Pitts one of his group’s top jobs come Sunday.

“You’d better have enough length, because there’s going to be enough 50/50 balls,” Quinn said. “That type of player in the NFL is a big piece of how to defend players in the NFL now, because whether it’s Pitts or other tight ends we’re facing around the league, it’s not traditional hand-in-the-dirt tight end all the time anymore. These are guys that play up in all different spots, and you have to have enough variety and different-style players to defend, because one week you may have to defend a player like him and then another week, it’s that receiver or running back. Each week, there’s some funkiness, and how do you match up? That’s one of the best parts of coaching the NFL. You’re talking about all these unique things that happen and how do you defend them and how do you play them?”

How the Cowboys choose to play Pitts in Week 10 may go a long way in determining how successfully the team kicks off the second half of their season.

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Cowboys place Greg Zuerlein on COVID list, to work out Brett Maher

The Cowboys were said to be holding kicker workouts on Wednesday; Zuerlein’s status and availability for Sunday is still not known. | From @ToddBrock24f7

Kicker Greg Zuerlein has been placed on the Reserve/COVID-19 list, according to the Cowboys. As of Tuesday afternoon, it is not known if Zuerlein tested positive for the virus or was deemed a close contact of someone else who received a positive test.

Until the kicker’s exact status is made public, it is also unclear if he would be eligible to return to action before Sunday’s game versus the Falcons at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

Zuerlein got no kicking opportunities in Week 9’s loss to Denver, save for three kickoffs. He missed a field goal in each of the two previous games, and two in the season opener. He is 14-of-18 on three-point tries, 21-of-23 on extra points for the season.

Michael Gehlken of the Dallas Morning News reports that the Cowboys would be looking at new options on Wednesday.

Currently, the Cowboys do not have a backup kicker. When Zuerlein was on injured reserve during training camp, the team brought in Lirim Hajrullahu for a short preseason stint. The former CFL All-Star was re-signed to Dallas briefly as special teams coordinator John Fassel assessed Zuerlein’s Week 1 troubles.

Brett Maher is reported to be one of the kickers being looked at. Maher played for Dallas in 2018 and for most of 2019, going 49-of-66 on field goals and 68-of-69 on PATs. Maher made multiple kicks of 60-plus yards as a Cowboy, but was released late in the 2019 season over accuracy issues.

Kai Forbath, who went 10-for-10 on field goals and 10-for-10 on extra points for the Cowboys during a three-game spell in 2019 (when he took over for Maher), is among the experienced NFL kickers not currently on a roster.

Fassel has said that punter Bryan Anger would be the team’s emergency kicker for an in-game situation. He’s also suggested that wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, defensive end Azur Kamara, and center Tyler Biadasz all have some degree of kicking skill, though the Dallas coaching staff is certainly not considering using any of them in an actual game if there is time to secure the services of a free agent specialist.

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Cowboys expect WR Michael Gallup to play vs Atlanta: ‘He’s going to do some awesome things’

Sidelined for seven games, the Cowboys’ WR is expected to provide a deep-ball threat against the Falcons and a boost for the offense. | From @ToddBrock24f7

If this were a comic-book movie, the group of superheroes have just gotten an unexpectedly thorough and embarrassing beatdown at the hands of a surprisingly robust bunch of bad guys. It happened right on the city streets with everyone watching, and now they’re limping and bloody in their tattered spandex suits, and they’re nursing their wounds amid the rubble as the stunned crowd looks on to see how they’ll rally for the next attack, due in very short order.

This would be the moment- as the audience starts to question the faith they had put into these suddenly-fallible figures, just when things look bleakest- that the camera pans. And there, emerging from the background as the music swells, is the hero that had been separated from the group earlier in the film. In fact, he’d almost been forgotten about. But now he’s back and ready for battle and represents a renewed sense of hope and optimism for the fight to come.

Only this hero doesn’t wear a cape. He wears No. 13.

Cowboys wide receiver Michael Gallup has missed the past seven games with a calf injury. But when executive vice president Stephen Jones said on Dallas radio Monday that the team would “get Michael Gallup back more than likely this week,” it buoyed a fanbase that was still stinging from a dismal showing from their offense, the kind that Cowboys Nation hoped had been left behind in the bizarro alternative-reality dimension known as 2020.

But the fans aren’t the only ones who have missed the fourth-year wideout from Colorado State. His offensive teammates are eager to have him back in the huddle as well.

“We’ll be really, really excited to get Michael,” offensive coordinator Kellen Moore said this week. “Obviously, huge aspirations for him as the season went on; he’s dealt with the injury as it went. We’re excited to have him back.”

Gallup’s injury in the season opener derailed what was to be a massive prove-it year for the 25-year-old. Set to become a free agent in 2022, Gallup had hoped to build off an 1,100-yard effort in 2019 and then a follow-up season in which he finished tied for the team lead in receiving touchdowns. A monster 2021 would translate to a lucrative new contract, either from Dallas or a new employer. But after just four catches in Week 1, Gallup was effectively shut down.

Finally cleared to practice again back on October 25, Gallup has been working with the Cowboys training staff to gradually get himself fully back to game speed. He was nearly ready for the Denver tilt, according to team owner Jerry Jones.

“Frankly, it was close,” Jones said Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan. “On hindsight you say, ‘Well, Michael does a great job of catching those long balls,’ which we really needed; some execution in our long passing game. And he does a great job. On hindsight, maybe you would have liked to see him out there, but that’s certainly hindsight. And that did not make the difference, the way we played. But it’s going to be good to have him back. We need him. He’s a really, really outstanding receiver.”

Head coach Mike McCarthy has confirmed that Gallup will practice in full on Wednesday. His return is tantalizingly close, hopefully coming Sunday.

“He’s going to do some awesome things for us; we’re excited,” Moore continued. “He’ll bring some juice, bring some energy. He’s going to go make some plays when he gets the opportunity and add to that room, make that room even more competitive, because we’ve got a lot of talent in that room that are excited. If they get an opportunity, they’re going to go take advantage of it.”

This week’s opponent, the Atlanta Falcons, will present a stiff challenge for Gallup and the Cowboys receiving corps. Their secondary is allowing just 10.5 yards per reception, tied for the sixth-best mark in the NFL. They’ve given up 300 fewer receiving yards than Dallas through eight games, and they’re the only defense in the league who has not allowed a pass play of over 40 yards all season.

Of course, the deep ball just happens to be Gallup’s superpower, with seven of his 13 career touchdowns coming from 20 yards or beyond. That quick-strike capability sure would have come in handy against Denver, when the Cowboys struggled so mightily to get anything on track and found themselves in a deep hole.

But perhaps the Atlanta native finally getting his comeback moment against his hometown Falcons is perfect storybook karma.

“I think it’s frustrating for everyone,” Moore said of how long it’s taken Gallup to mend from his stubborn injury. “Every player, you always want an opportunity to play. I think Michael’s just at that point now, obviously, where he’s getting closer and closer and ready to roll. He’s going to be real excited.”

In other words, get ready for a blockbuster second act from the superhero wearing No. 13.

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