In a tense press conference that put the head coach’s frustrations on clear display, it was the quote that will stick in the craw of Cowboys fans over the course of the next short week.
Following a thoroughly embarrassing 38-10 home loss to the Cardinals in front of a national Monday Night Football audience, a game in which Dallas looked lifeless at best and historically inept for the rest of the time, Mike McCarthy’s perspective on how the team looked in workouts leading up to the Week 6 game will not sit well with a fanbase watching the season go down in flames.
“As I continue to learn this team,” McCarthy said early in his postgame remarks, “I felt like the preparation coming into the game was probably our best so far this year.”
There are numerous ways to assess a football team. The win-loss record is the most obvious; it’s ultimately the only thing that matters. But if the goal is to find the silver lining, the glimmer of hope, the truth behind the standings, there are countless other ways to crunch the numbers and judge a roster.
Gaudy offensive totals can show high-scoring potential in regard to the playmaking positions. Low points or yards allowed can indicate a stifling defense capable of beating anybody on a given day. Even a stat like close-game win percentage can try to factor in lucky bounces and bad breaks, showing a team that finds a way to win more often than not.
But nobody in sports talks about how well a team practices as a measure of anything meaningful.
To be fair, McCarthy followed his line about the squad’s preparation with an admission that it’s all a moot point come kickoff.
It came in McCarthy’s opening comments, the traditional big-picture recap of the game he offers before taking reporters’ questions. And his introductory remarks show a palpable frustration with the team’s turnover problem. The Cowboys gave away the ball four times, resulting in a slew of points for Arizona that Dallas was never able to come close to matching.
“Very disappointing home loss here this evening. Frankly, until we get off this turnover ratio- negative-12 for the year- we’re not playing well enough as a football team to overcome those critical errors. It happened again tonight. I thought the defense came out strong with the three stops there in the first quarter. The turnovers definitely changed the game. Clearly we didn’t handle the adversity of the four turnovers. We’re giving up, I think, 24 points off of turnovers tonight. We’re the worst in the league at taking care of the football. We’re not taking it away. And we’re giving up more points than anybody in the league off of turnovers. It’s frustrating to see the pattern here [in] five of the six games this year. We’ve got to continue to work at it. As I continue to learn this team, I felt like the preparation coming into the game was probably our best so far this year. But obviously, that doesn’t account for anything, particularly after a performance like tonight.”
In the full context of McCarthy’s recap, the preparation line speaks to his surprise that his players aren’t able to do something on Sundays (or Monday night) that they apparently do the other days of the week.
Many of the questions directed at the players after the game were about mindset, about the mental aspect of the game, about a here-we-go-again feeling of hopelessness that can wash over a team as mistakes start to pile up, as past errors repeat themselves, as additional players go down with injuries.
Ezekiel Elliott was asked about his fumbles. Andy Dalton spoke about the turnovers that he contributed to with a pair of interceptions.
The defense got the questions, too, after giving up over 37 points for the fifth week in a row.
“I feel like we’re good, mentally,” linebacker Leighton Vander Esch said in the wake of his first game back since Week 1. “We’ve just got to clean stuff up and play one snap at a time, one week at a time.”
“It’s mental. We have the physical. There’s no question about the physical,” Jaylon Smith added. “Collectively, as a whole, we have to lock in and do it right. Enough talking about it, we’ve got to do it right.”
And whether it’s the defense giving up yet another explosive play, the star running back putting the ball on the turf two plays in a row, or the last stud in the offensive line wall hobbling out of the tunnel before halftime, the 2020 Cowboys haven’t found the switch that lets them come together as a unit and work past those issues when they happen during a game.
“The mental and emotional game and growth of your football team, in my opinion, is always the last component to come and develop to the level that you need to be successful,” McCarthy said. “Obviously, ours isn’t quite where we want to be right now. But I can only go off of [the fact that] I work with these men every day, they give it up for us as coaches every single day. They’re doing the extra work that’s been asked of them. But we haven’t handled the adversity in games. It’s an unfortunate part of the game when players do get injured, but we had a chance to prepare for this team. You have to overcome adverse situations in the game.”
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