This Cowboys Tuesday is presented by the letter F.
Fans were undoubtedly throwing the letter around liberally as they watched their team get mauled again on Monday night. Fifth loss in a row. Fouls. Flags. Fumbles. Fourth-down failures. A foolish fake punt.
There was no shortage of opportunities for plenty of F-words in the 34-10 loss, but head coach Mike McCarthy kept coming back to a different one in his postgame press conference.
“It’s very frustrating. It’s frustrating for everybody. Frustrating for the players, frustrating for the coaches, I know it’s disappointing for the fans,” McCarthy told reporters late Monday night from the podium at AT&T Stadium.
He used the word frustrating (or some derivative) nine times in a ten-minute Q&A session.
“Hell, they’d better be frustrated,” he said of his players. “I mean, we’re all frustrated. I think there would be something wrong if they weren’t frustrated.”
Well, something is definitely wrong, even with the rampant frustration. Yet the coach struggled to pinpoint exactly why this team keeps losing so badly.
“We’re not playing well enough or executing well enough, coaching well enough to overcome some of the mistakes we’re making at critical times in the game.”
Like going 0-for-4 on fourth down conversion attempts. Like committing nine penalties (not to mention having four defensive players flagged for personal fouls on the same snap). Like getting into the red zone just once and not having a single snap in goal-to-go. Like fumbling twice on the same play and helplessly watching it turn into a scoop-and-score for the opponent.
Like taking Brandon Aubrey’s field goal off the scoreboard and then coming away empty after a slapstick series of plays that turned the ball over on downs inside the Houston 10.
Like that ill-advised fake punt in the Cowboys’ own end and on the offense’s first possession, the second such debacle in three weeks, and one which McCarthy described as “a poor call by us.”
Like asking the backup quarterback coming off a historically bad performance to attempt the most passes in his career and the most throws by any Cowboys quarterback in a game in over three years.
“I would have liked to have been a lot more balanced, run to pass,” McCarthy explained. “I don’t want to throw the ball 40 times.”
Except it was 55 (56 if you count Bryan Anger’s four-yard lob… in a situation that needed nine).
But despite all the mistakes, miscues, and missed plays, McCarthy says he won’t be doing anything radically different as the team prepares for two more games in the next 10 days.
“We’ve just got to stay after it,” the coach said. “I’m disappointed, I’m frustrated for our guys because I know how much they put into this. We’ve just got to keep banging away.”
Don’t expect much to change during this short week of practices, because McCarthy says practices aren’t the issue.
“Our problem isn’t effort during the week; I haven’t seen that. We’re just not making critical plays.”
Don’t look for some massive overhaul of the roster, either. Despite a record that currently has the team staring at a top-10 draft pick, McCarthy has no interest in giving up on his starters in favor of simply getting younger guys game reps.
“We’re playing the best players to win the game,” he said.
“I have every reason to believe that we can get better. We have to be cleaner. The discipline and the details; you’re tired of hearing about it, but I’ve just got to keep pushing it and making them focus on it. And I do believe we’ll come out on the other side.
“We’ve got to win. We deserve to win. We deserve the opportunity to win, and that’s about putting the best people out there, and right now they’re young. Our young guys are getting a lot of experience, but we need to do whatever the hell we need to do to win.”
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By that logic, then, McCarthy should be at least open to the idea of making a change. Many Cowboys fans are ready to move on from backup quarterback Cooper Rush and get third-stringer Trey Lance a lot more involved.
Even McCarthy himself admitted he should have done so Monday night.
“I think the one thing I should have done at the end, and I didn’t do it, was put Trey in there. I could have gotten him a series. That’s one thing I would second-guess myself on,” he told media members… though whether that was an oversight or a message to ownership is up for debate.
“I really just didn’t want to get into putting him in for a play or two, because he’s more than a gadget player, in my opinion. We had him prepared to take a series, and frankly, there at the end, I should have given him that series. I regret not doing that.”
Add that to the long list of frustrations to come out of the Monday meltdown. But come Tuesday, McCarthy will be back at work, looking to turn it around the only way he knows how: by leaning on the coaches and players around him to keep putting in the work and trusting that the process will lead to something positive.
“Just trust the people in the room, the people that are doing the work. I do, I believe in this locker room,” McCarthy explained.
“There is good coming out of this. You don’t see it because we’re not winning games, but there’s young men that are getting an opportunity to do more, and I do believe that will pay it forward. It needs to hurry the hell up, because we need it in six days.”
Forward. Another F-word. And right now, for a very frustrated Cowboys team desperate to distance themselves from some of the losing squads of the franchise’s past they’re being lumped in with, it may be the only one that offers any hope.
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