Tag: Ben Dinucci

What We Learned: Cowboys rookie DT is ready, WR rotation tough to crack

If the dress rehearsal is to show how ready for the season a team is, the Cowboys stood to learn a few things about themselves in their third preseason tilt. | From @BenGrimaldi

The Dallas Cowboys are now 0-3 on the preseason after losing to the Houston Texans by the score of 20-14. They’ll have one more chance to get a win on their exhibition slate when they face off against the Jacksonville Jaguars before the regular season begins.

Losing isn’t fun, but the evaluations are more important than the team’s win-loss record in the preseason. The Cowboys did some good things in the loss, yet they still couldn’t come away with a win. Here’s what we learned in the latest preseason adventure for the Cowboys.

Winners and Losers: Cowboys QBs separate themselves in loss, a 5th WR emerges?

Cooper Rush and Ben DiNucci lead the winners and losers from the Dallas Cowboys’ preseason loss to the Houston Texans. | From @NoHuddle

The Dallas Cowboys extend their “meaningless” losing streak to three straight games after falling to the Houston Texans 20-14 in what was considered their dress rehearsal. The performances Saturday night would be best described as a mixed bag for a team that couldn’t score in the second half. As always, there are winners and there are losers, so it’s time to dive in.

Ben DiNucci’s 3 second-half INTs sink Cowboys in 20-14 loss to Texans

The Dallas defense played well without its coordinator, but QB Ben DiNucci’s decision-making and turnovers gave Houston the Governor’s Cup. | From @ToddBrock24f7

For one half of preseason football, things were clicking for the Cowboys. Cooper Rush had led the offense on a pair of touchdown drives- after Garrett Gilbert was ineffective over the first two series- and perhaps given himself a leg up over Gilbert for the backup quarterback job. The defense, meanwhile, had kept Houston mostly bottled up, save for an opening possession that started practically in the Cowboys’ red zone.

But after the intermission, it was Ben DiNucci time. The second-year passer out of James Madison responded with three interceptions, including one that was returned for a touchdown that tied the game and another that ended a potential game-winning drive late. One has to wonder if Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy will finally give up on DiNucci after the dreadful performance in which he made several poor throws and exhibited even poorer decision-making.

The defense, meanwhile, showed improvement- despite being without their defensive coordinator. Dan Quinn left the stadium prior to kickoff, following COVID-19 protocols, according to the team. Secondary coach Joe Whitt Jr. took over defensive play-calling duties from the booth. The unit responded by holding the Texans to just that one offensive touchdown (on a short field) and two field goals. The defense also showed up on third downs, allowing Houston to convert just one all night.

But in the end, turnovers doomed Dallas. If the third preseason game was the “dress rehearsal” for the regular season, the Cowboys coaching staff will have to consider ordering a wardrobe overhaul for at least one of their backup passers. The next wave of roster cuts comes Tuesday, with the final preseason game next Sunday versus Jacksonville.

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Stephen Jones offers clues on who will be Cowboys’ backup QB

The Cowboys’ EVP left out a current QB in talking about the backup job behind Dak Prescott, and hinted at possibly acquiring a new player. | From @ToddBrock24f7

The backup quarterback is always an important- some say the most important- position on any NFL team. For the 2021 Dallas Cowboys, there’s an extra sense of apprehension about who would take the reins should something happen to starter Dak Prescott. Last year’s lesson was a hard one for everyone involved.

The irony, of course, is that Dallas was in a better spot heading into 2020 than in recent memory, having signed veteran Andy Dalton in the spring. Dalton took over for Prescott in Week 5, but didn’t last long. Before Week 7’s game was over, the Cowboys had turned to the backup’s backup, Ben DiNucci. And by Week 9, the backup’s backup’s backup- Garrett Gilbert- was starting under center.

Cooper Rush was re-signed to the Cowboys late last season as an insurance policy. Dalton has since moved on to Chicago. That leaves the Cowboys to anoint a new QB2 behind Prescott.

Team executive vice president Stephen Jones was non-committal when asked on Friday about who had the upper hand in the camp battle. But his answer did offer some clues as to how the organization might be thinking about the backup spot with less than three weeks to opening night.

“I think Gilbert and Cooper have got to continue to work, and they’re fighting for that Number Two spot,” Jones said on 105.3 The Fan. “Obviously, Gilbert’s got a little advantage there, but they’re obviously working to hold on to that role there.”

DiNucci was notably absent from Jones’s answer. The second-year passer out of tiny James Madison was thrown into the fire as a rookie, but it’s possible he’s being viewed as little more than a long-term practice-squad project at best right now.

But that doesn’t mean it’s either Gilbert or Rush. Jones hinted that Prescott’s primary backup may well be a quarterback who’s not even in the building at this point.

“As I’ve said time and time again, player acquisition is 365 days a year,” he continued, “and we’re always looking to get better. They’re not only competing against each other, but they’re competing against other people in the NFL, just as other people at other positions on our football team are doing the same thing.”

Saturday’s preseason tilt against the Texans could go a long way in helping the staff decide between Gilbert or Rush… or perhaps prompting them to shop around for the proverbial player to be named later. There will likely be a surprise cut or two in someone else’s camp before long, or a more serviceable passer that the team feels it could land in a trade.

What’s clear is this: the job of backing up Prescott will come with some added pressure this year.

Prescott supposedly healed fully from his catastrophic ankle injury… only to suffer a shoulder strain in training camp. When Week 1 rolls around, Prescott will have been banned from throwing for a fair portion of the team’s offseason work, taken exactly zero snaps in four preseason games, and gone 333 days without seeing live-fire action against an opposing team.

All of which makes the backup quarterback a position of great interest once again in Dallas.

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WATCH: Dinucci delivers go-ahead TD pass to Brandon Smith

Down in the fourth quarter, none other than Ben Dinucci delivered a go-ahead touchdown with his signature sidearm throw to Brandon Smith. | From @CDBurnett7

Through seven quarters, the Dallas Cowboys had failed to score a touchdown. Things were looking towards another loss full of field goals but Dallas’s offense finally stepped up late.

Entering the fourth quarter, the Cowboys had the ball down 13-9 and the offense had yet to score a touchdown in the preseason. After missing on multiple deep pass attempts, quarterback Ben Dinucci delivered his signature sidearm throw to Brandon Smith in the back of the endzone for the lead.

This is Smith’s first career touchdown, giving Dallas a lead with less than ten minutes left in regulation. For “The Nooch”, this adds to the lore of Dinucci’s sidearm throws, with this one resulting in the biggest play of the game, and the potential game-winning score.

Cowboys QBs evenly mediocre; McCarthy stresses ‘good things that we can learn from’

Dak Prescott’s trio of backups had similarly flat stat lines Thursday night, as Mike MCarthy looks to build tape for the team to study.

Cowboys fans knew they wouldn’t be seeing Dak Prescott make his return to real game action on Thursday night in Canton. But if they were hoping to come away from the Hall of Fame Game with a better sense of who Prescott’s primary backup would be for the 2021 season, a lackluster performance from all three passers provided no real clarity.

Garrett Gilbert, Cooper Rush, and Ben DiNucci came out of the 16-3 loss with strikingly similar stat lines, with no one doing much to distance himself from the competition.

One year ago, Gilbert was in Cleveland, gunning for a spot on the Browns’ roster. He was cut before the season opener and signed by the Cowboys in October after Prescott’s ankle injury. He took the first offensive snaps for Dallas, finishing the evening 9-of-13 and 104 passing yards.

“I thought Gilbert did a really good job,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy told reporters afterward. “I’m sure there’s a decision or two that we’ll look at that he may want back. But I thought he was very productive in his work.”

For Gilbert, who started Week 9’s meeting with the Steelers last season (and nearly engineered a Cowboys upset win), it was a chance to knock off the rust… and get the rust knocked off of him.

“Fun to go get hit every once in a while. It’s been a while,” the 30-year-old said, “so it’s nice to get knocked down and be able get back up again. I enjoyed that.”

He enjoyed it so much, he took two sacks in his limited action, while driving the offense to its only points, a short field goal by Hunter Niswander.

“We moved the ball really well,” Gilbert commented, “but then got down to the red zone and kind of got stalled out a couple times. Got to do a better job on third down, situationally, in order to finish off those drives and get ourselves some points.”

McCarthy wasn’t as concerned about the final score as he was with getting a read on several players and personnel packages. But the team’s timeshare approach to the quarterback position was- by his own admission- as much about not wearing out any arms before Saturday’s joint practice with the Rams.

“This is a three-day window for us,” McCarthy said. “We’ve got a lot of work; we had tonight’s game, and then we flip around Saturday and we’ve got the Rams for intersquad practice. So the way we played our players was really with both the game tonight and the practice Saturday in mind. I’m very hopeful and confident that’ll we’ll come out of both of these opportunities with a lot of great tape and a lot of things we can build off of.”

In relief of Gilbert, Rush went 8-of-13 and recorded 70 passing yards.

“Cooper did a nice job,” McCarthy noted. “Took a couple hits, threw in the face of a couple hits. Obviously, we had plenty of pressure to deal with tonight, so that’s great work for the quarterbacks. These are a lot of good situations that we had tonight.”

McCarthy has emphasized situational football thus far in training camp, so putting his players in a variety of different scenarios all goes toward building more tape that the team and coaching staff can study moving forward.

“Definitely there’s going to be a lot to correct, but these are good things that we can learn from and build,” the coach expained. “I think the fact that we have tonight and then Saturday work against the Rams back-to-back? I think come this time Monday, we’re going to feel pretty good about where we are.”

Cowboys fans may not have felt quite so good about DiNucci’s second-half outing. He finished 7-of-17 and 89 passing yards with one interception.

“I think the [play] that sticks out is the turnover; it’s going to be highlighted,” the 2020 seventh-round pick said. “I got hit when I was throwing and the ball sailed a little bit. That’s on me; that’s easily correctable. It’s not like I made the wrong read. Just got to bring the ball down a little bit.”

DiNucci seemed to go to his sidearm slinging/throwing motion frequently throughout the night, whether it was truly necessary or not. It’s hard to imagine coaches won’t spend some time with him on his mechanics in the coming days and weeks; even McCarthy struggled to find the right word when reviewing his project’s performance.

“I thought DiNucci made some throws off his back foot that were, you know… unique.”

On the plus side, the 24-year-old out of James Madison added 34 ground yards to his stat sheet on just two scrambles. He was the team’s second-leading rusher for the game.

“I kind of pride myself on that,” he explained. “In today’s day and age, you need to be able to be athletic to play quarterback for when the pocket breaks down, or some of those nakeds or designed runs are called. Being able to use my feet, be smart about it, get as many yards as I can and get down, that gets me in a groove as well. Being able to use my legs, I think, keeps the defense honest. It’s all positives for me.”

But whether it’s enough to push him up the depth chart remains to be seen. With the club taking a slow and methodical approach with working Prescott back into live action, DiNucci, Rush, and Gilbert should all gets reps against the Rams on Saturday and then again August 13th when the Cowboys travel to Arizona.

Each of them is likely living by the mindset Gilbert explained to the media after Thursday’s opening exhibition:

“My job remains the same: I’m going to go out there every day and be the best quarterback I can be for this football team and let the chips fall where they may.”

After the team’s first game action in 214 days, it’s impossible to tell where those chips will land for any of the Cowboys’ backups.

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Cowboys News: Randy Gregory ‘unstoppable” in camp, Dalton Schultz impresses

The Cowboys offense says of Gregory, “We can’t stop him;” Dalton Schultz, Ben DiNucci, and Maurice Canady are among other camp notables. | From @ToddBrock24f7

Several Cowboys players aren’t waiting around to make moves. Tight end Dalton Schultz may be pressing to keep the starting job as Blake Jarwin continues to work his way back from an ACL injury, and Randy Gregory appears to be putting on a clinic at defensive end, prompting a former player and coach to predict an All-Pro campaign for the veteran still on the comeback trail. Maurice Canady is finally getting his Cowboys career started after opting out of 2020, Ben DiNucci is gunning for the primary backup quarterback job, Connor Williams is taking snaps at center, and a new cornerback has been welcomed into the fold.

Plenty more tidbits from camp to start a new week, too. Fans in Oxnard hoping to catch a glimpse of Amari Cooper and DeMarcus Lawrence may have to wait, Troy Aikman stopped by practice to share his expectations for the 2021 offense, Noah Brown and Sean McKeon get the player-profile treatment, slick grass during morning practices may become an issue, and Dan Quinn could become a breakout star when the Cowboys hit HBO. All that, plus a look at the remarkable Hall of Fame journey of Cowboys safety Cliff Harris, and Dez Bryant may not be done quite yet. Here’s your News and Notes.

Cowboys QB Ben DiNucci says first start ‘wasn’t me;’ history says he may be right

The rookie hopes a real offseason will provide a better launch than he got last year, but his first pro start was in line with others.

Playing quarterback in the NFL is hard. Playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, it could be argued, ups the degree of difficulty even more.

The ghosts of Meredith, Staubach, Aikman, Romo, and others might as well be in the huddle when a signal-caller makes his first professional start for America’s Team. And that’s the kind of thing that was running through Ben DiNucci’s mind on November 1st of last year as he was announced as the Cowboys’ starting quarterback in Week 8 in Philadelphia.

“It was a surreal moment for me,” DiNucci reflected, via the team’s official website. “That’s something I’ll be able to say for the rest of my life: ‘Hey, I started a game for the Dallas Cowboys my rookie year.'”

The rest of that night, though, was largely forgettable for the rookie. DiNucci went just 21-for-40 for 180 passing yards. He didn’t throw a touchdown or an interception, but he also didn’t make a strong impression in the 23-9 loss. His first start was a whirlwind that left the small-school rookie wondering what had happened.

“I feel like that wasn’t me out there.”

He wasn’t out there again. The third-stringer, who had come on in relief of the concussed Andy Dalton (who was, of course, subbing for the injured Dak Prescott), was back on the sideline the following week. Garrett Gilbert was signed off Cleveland’s practice squad and given the nod in Week 9 versus Pittsburgh.

Many fans were ready to dismiss DiNucci as a bust after a total of just 94 snaps in his rookie season. But that’s about 90 more than anyone in the Cowboys organization could have anticipated when they drafted him in the seventh round out of James Madison.

The 24-year-old may have been thrown in to the fire in a division-rivalry game in a hostile environment, but he says he got more used to the heat as the evening wore on.

“But I think just some positives for me, as you watched the game progress, I felt like I got a little more comfortable every quarter. Just some things, when the checkdown is there, take the checkdown, a positive play is a good play, no negative plays, just throwing the ball out of bounds when guys aren’t open. Just things that come with playing.”

Just playing wasn’t as easy as it should have been for DiNucci- or anyone- in 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic turning his entire rookie offseason into a virtual Zoom class, DiNucci never even got onto the football field with his Cowboys teammates until August’s abbreviated training camp.

So forgive the sophomore if he’s treating 2021 like it’s really his first time.

“It’ll be nice to have preseason this year just to kind of be able to get back in the flow of games, play in games and get out there and show what I can do.”

For what it’s worth, what DiNucci showed in his first start wasn’t even wildly different from the norm. Here’s a look at every quarterback who made his first NFL start as a member of the Cowboys over the past 20 seasons.

Player, date of 1st NFL start Comp Att Yds TD INT Result
Anthony Wright, 12/17/2000 vs NYG 13 25 119 0 1 L, 13-17
Quincy Carter, 9/9/2001 vs TB 9 19 34 0 2 L, 6-10
Clint Stoerner, 10/28/2001 vs ARZ 9 19 93 0 1 W, 17-3
Chad Hutchinson, 10/27/2002 vs SEA 12 24 145 1 0 L, 14-17
Drew Henson, 11/25/2004 vs CHI 4 12 31 0 1 W, 21-7
Tony Romo, 10/29/2006 at CAR 24 36 270 1 1 W, 35-14
Stephen McGee, 1/2/2011 at PHI 11 27 127 1 0 W, 14-13
Kellen Moore, 12/27/2015 at BUF 13 31 186 0 1 L, 6-16
Dak Prescott, 9/11/2016 vs NYG 25 45 227 0 0 L, 19-20
Ben DiNucci, 11/1/2020 at PHI 21 40 180 0 0 L, 9-23
Garrett Gilbert, 11/8/2020 vs PIT 21 38 243 1 1 L, 19-24

Not much rhyme or reason there. Some forgettable names walked off the field winners in their first start; the club’s current superstar and offensive mastermind both lost theirs. Romo’s first start was a good performance, but he had logged three training camps and two full seasons with the team prior. Prescott was thrown to the wolves as a rookie in Week 1 and didn’t exactly light it up in his first start. Even Gilbert, who many crowned as an immediate and obvious upgrade over DiNucci, didn’t post stats that were exponentially better.

The point is, it’s difficult- and historically speaking, premature- to write off DiNucci based solely on the basis of that Eagles game.

“Yeah, I think last year was weird, and being a rookie I think that was just kind of all that we knew,” DiNucci said during this year’s minicamp. “So this is really nice just getting in here and getting some reps, get comfortable going into camp and just kind of getting my feet on the ground. It’s a lot better when you’ve got guys around to bounce things off each other. It’s nice to be in the building and see faces and get out and practice a little bit.”

With a little more of that practice, a true offseason program, and some playing time under his belt, Cowboys coaches and fans may be able to more accurately gauge whether DiNucci belongs in the same breath with Stoerner and McGee… or Romo and Prescott.

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Cowboys trying out QBs, DiNucci not allowed at rookie minicamp

The Cowboys brought in two QBs for tryouts, and Ben DiNucci is getting another shot at some of the rookie programs he missed a year ago.

The Dallas Cowboys do not have many holes on the offensive side of their roster, however the club is actively in the market for a backup quarterback.

Last week Dallas brought in Jeff Driskel for a visit. Driskel departed without a deal, and now two more quarterbacks are visiting with the Cowboys. Former Ohio Sate QB J.T. Barrett and former Illinois State QB Brady Davis are both set to tryout with Dallas, according to ESPN’s Todd Archer.

Following an extremely successful collegiate career, Barrett has yet to find an NFL home, although he spent time with the Saints, Seahawks, and Steelers’ practice squads.

Davis is an undrafted rookie who spent the last two seasons as the started for Illinois State after transferring from Memphis. Davis did enough to get on the radar of draft guru Dane Brugler, who said this about the former Red Bird signal caller, “Davis is an athletic competitor who can rip the ball, but inconsistencies as a passer (timing, placement, balance) will be tough to overcome vs. NFL speed.”

As far as quarterbacks behind Dak Prescott that are currently under contract, the Cowboys have Garrett Gilbert, Cooper Rush, and Ben DiNucci.

It looked like DiNucci was going to participate in this weekend’s rookie minicamp, as last year the rookies were never given the chance, but Archer reported that DiNucci was ineligible for this weekends rookie minicamp. However,  Archer did note that DiNucci can still take part in the Rookie Football Development Program that begins next week.

It remains to be seen how the Cowboys will handle deciding on the backups for Prescott.

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Cowboys 53-man roster prediction is heavy on defense following draft

The Dallas Cowboys will go heavy on defense in this way too early 53-man roster prediction for the 2021 season.

The 2021 NFL draft dust is just settling, rookie free agents are in the process of getting signed and the teams are narrowing down their rosters to 90 players. The Dallas Cowboys did a little house cleaning to their roster when they released veteran players recently, most notably DT Antwaun Woods, to reach the threshold.

Now set within the roster rules with their 90-man arsenal, the Cowboys have less than four months to trim the player down to its initial 53-man team. Here’s a way too early guess at what the 2021 edition of the Cowboys might look like when they break training camp and head into the season.