Tag: 2024 season week 1

Composite power rankings have Cowboys all over map, but ultimately looking good vs Browns

From @ToddBrock247: A look at 21 sets of power rankings has Dallas as high as 5th and as low as 19th for their season opener. The truth is somewhere in between.

Power rankings can be fun to look at and certainly make for serious sports debate, but it’s always important to take the source into consideration. For every analyst who thinks Team A is markedly better than Team B, there’s another talking head from somewhere else who says just the opposite.

The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.

Germany-based stats guy René Bugner, familiar to NFL fans for compiling draft report cards every year and giving composite grades, has worked his spreadsheet magic on power rankings for Week 1 of the 2024 regular season. Using the published rankings from 21 different outlets, Bugner delivers a more comprehensive look at where each team in the league really falls in the eyes of all the major analysts, not just one.

Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of fluctuation in how the experts see the Cowboys shaping up for their opener in Cleveland, but the overall average ranking should leave fans feeling optimistic about Sunday’s game versus the Browns.

Dallas ranks as high as 5th, earning that spot from both Mike Clay at ESPN and Frank Schwab at Yahoo Sports. John Kosko at PFF has the Cowboys slotted 6th, and Josh Kendall of The Athletic puts them at 7.

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Those relatively high marks get dragged down somewhat by Nate Davis at USA Today and Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk, who have the Cowboys ranked 18th and 19th, respectively. Mark Maske of the Washington Post grades them slightly better, at 15th, while the New York Post‘s Ryan Dunleavy and Vinnie Iyer of Sporting News rank Dallas 14th this week.

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The other 12 sets of power rankings, though, all have the Cowboys sitting between 9th and 12th. And that’s where the Cowboys finish, with an overall average ranking of 11.00, good for 10th-best in the league this week.

The Browns aren’t too far behind, ranking as high as 9th and as low as 19th. Their average ranking of 13.19 signals that the two teams will likely be well-matched for a close contest when they meet on the shores of Lake Erie.

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Playing for hated college team will help Cowboys rookie LB ‘cut it loose’ as Week 1 starter in Cleveland

From @ToddBrock24f7: Having played in the country’s most intimidating venues with Notre Dame should help Marist Liufau be unfazed by Cleveland’s Dawg Pound.

It’s now just a few days until he makes his NFL debut, but Marist Liufau sure seems like anything but a wide-eyed rookie. The third-round draft pick has already been penciled in as one of the starting linebackers for the Dallas Cowboys in Sunday’s regular-season opener in Cleveland.

And with all due respect to the venerable Dawg Pound, nothing the newly-renamed Huntington Bank Field can throw at him is likely to faze the 23-year-old Liufau. He did, after all, see his very first college snaps as a visitor between the fabled hedges in Athens, Georgia. Then over his tenure with the Fighting Irish came road contests at The Big House in Ann Arbor, The Horseshoe in Columbus, L.A. Memorial Coliseum, and Clemson’s Death Valley: some of the biggest and most awe-inspiring settings in the nation for a college player.

“You either love Notre Dame or you hate them, so everywhere we go on the road, everyone hates us, ” Liufau told reporters this week at The Star. “That’s helped me to grow as a player and kind of handle those environments and sort it out.”

So Liufau’s nonchalant approach to his first game week as a pro is perhaps to be expected.

“I really just take every day and treat it like it’s game day,” he said, “so that when I get to the actual environment, it’s really easy.”

In fact, most everything has seemingly come easy for the native-born Hawaiian since joining the Cowboys. Liufau is just one part of a larger defensive overhaul engineered by new coordinator Mike Zimmer, but the rookie reveals that despite the brain-bending learning curve that comes with learning the NFL ropes- as well as an entirely new playbook- his DC has given him very simple instructions for his pro debut.

“Especially for me, Coach Zim would just say to me, ‘Just cut it loose,'” Liufau explained. “Let him do the thinking, and when we get to game time, just go out there and have fun.”

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The fun has apparently already started in practice. Head coach Mike McCarthy let it slip recently that Liufau could be seen seen grinning ear-to-ear behind his facemask as new defensive tackle additions Linval Joseph and Jordan Phillips were making their presence known on several run plays during drills. Shutting down the ground game this season will no doubt be a focus for Liufau and his linebackermates, a job that should made somewhat easier with 670 pounds of experienced run-stuffing beef in front of them.

“Having great D-linemen in front of linebackers is, it’s everything, really,” Liufau confirmed.

“Any time we step onto the field, it’s really trying to prove that we’re a top defense in the NFL.”

If Liufau is able to help the Dallas defense do that with a strong debut showing in Cleveland, much of the credit, he says, will go to the Cowboys coaches staff. More intense film study and opponent-specific prep work, he’s found, is one of the major differences in making the transition from college- even a big-time program- to the pros.

“The detail that coaches go through to get, really, the game plan to us, detailing out the personnel for us, what our opponent likes to do,” he offered by way of example. “Also, the attention to detail from the players is next-level. Everyone is being intentional with what they’re doing out there on the field and in the meeting room.”

Liufau is confident that very intentional approach will translate to a business-as-usual NFL debut versus the Browns in their own house on Sunday, even if it’s all brand new to the fresh-faced rookie.

As new as, say, Liufau’s first-ever college tailgating experience, which took place just this past weekend when his alma mater paid a visit to yet another intimidating football mecca, Texas A&M’s Kyle Field.

“It was very fun,” Liufau reported.

He said it with a smile.

But just wait until he makes his first tackle in front of the Dawg Pound.

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Cowboys to face Browns Week 1 in Tom Brady’s booth debut

From @ToddBrock24f7: The Cowboys will travel to Cleveland to face last year’s 11-6 Browns, but the bigger story may be Tom Brady debut in the Fox booth.

The Cowboys will kick off the 2024 regular season in Cleveland with a late-Sunday afternoon matchup in Week 1 against the Browns.

If that pairing doesn’t exactly move the needle for you, consider that the game will be broadcast on FOX and will therefore feature the booth debut of Tom Brady.

The announcement was made Monday afternoon, two days ahead of the league’s schedule release. In a live reveal of the news at the network upfronts, Brady took the opportunity to take a thinly-veiled shot at the team he faced in his last two season openers… and also lost his final NFL game to.

The Browns went 11-6 in 2023 and won an impressive eight of the nine home games they played at their eponymous stadium on the shores of Lake Erie. They appeared in the wild card round of the AFC playoffs, losing to Houston.

This season will mark Cleveland’s fifth under head coach Kevin Stefanski, but the club has undergone several coaching changes during the offseason, including naming Ken Dorsey their new offensive coordinator.

Deshaun Watson returns as the starting quarterback following a shoulder injury last November, while running back Nick Chubb looks to come back from a major knee injury suffered in Week 2. Former Cowboys receiver Amari Cooper logged a career-best 1,250-yard season in 2023, his second with the Browns after being traded by Dallas.

The Cleveland defense is still anchored by five-time Pro Bowl defensive end Myles Garrett, who was named last season’s NFL Defensive Player of the Year, an award Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons was also up for.

The Browns were fairly active in free agency, signing such notables as running backs D’Onta Foreman and Nyheim Hines, linebacker Jordan Hicks, quarterback Jameis Winston, and kicker Cade York. They obtained wide receiver Jerry Jeudy in a trade with Denver.

While the the team did not have a first-round pick in this year’s draft, they did select Ohio State defensive tackle Michael Hall Jr. in the second round and took Michigan guard Zak Zinter in the third.

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ESPN ranks the Browns 12th in their post-free agency power rankings, just one spot behind Dallas.

But despite what should be a evenly-matched clash on the field, much of the hype around this game will nonetheless be based on the broadcast debut of Brady, who supplants Greg Olsen as the color analyst for Fox’s A-team and will sit alongside play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt.

“Obviously, having the Cowboys on is a huge draw as America’s Team. That’s going to get a little hard for me to say that all the time,” Brady told Michael Strahan during the reveal of the Week 1 matchup.

“In this new role, I know the Cowboys, how important they are to this network. They’ve got great storylines. Dak Prescott: let’s see if he can finally come through,” Brady joked, before cheekily adding to a snickering crowd, “Did that just slip out?”

The Cowboys will open the 2024 season on Sept. 8.

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