Blogging The Boys
In football, the game is usually described as a game of inches. However, for the 2025 Dallas Cowboys, it seems to have become a game of yards. The Dallas defense continues to struggle, allowing opposing teams and their offenses to tee off against them, with the Carolina Panthers being the latest.
Bryce Young’s offense averaged 6.4 yards per play, with the real hero being Rico Dowdle, who had back-to-back games over 200 yards from scrimmage. The first player to do so since Dalvin Cook did it in 2020, and the first undrafted free agent to ever accomplish that.
Dak Prescott and George Pickens looked like All-Pros for 95 percent of Sunday, with the worst five percent coming on their final drive, when Dallas’ offense ran three plays for negative eight yards and was forced to punt with just over six minutes to play. Prescott never saw the field again as the Panthers walked off with a field goal to win it.
Here are five key takeaways from the Cowboys’ third loss of the season.
The Mike Nolan era in Dallas feels like a blur, but maybe that’s because it was so bad that many who lived through it tried to forget it as soon as the season ended. Somehow, those old feelings many had then are coming up, just a few weeks into 2025. It can’t be 2020 levels of bad on defense, right? Wrong.
Here are a few statistics in several major categories comparing the defensive performance six weeks into the seasons of 2020 and 2025 (courtesy of Stathead)
2020:
– 2,460 total yards allowed (28th)
– 6.01 yards per play allowed (25th)
– 106.1 opposing passer rating (25th)
– 56 rushing first downs allowed (31st)
– 48.8 third down conversion rate (27th)
2025:
– 2,470 total yds allowed (32nd)
– 6.18 yards per play allowed (30th)
– 116.9 opposing passer rating (32nd)
– 61 rushing first downs allowed (32nd)
– 53.2 third down conversion rate (32nd)
This is not what a Matt Eberflus defense is supposed to look like, or at least that’s how fans were led to believe when he was hired at the beginning of the year. The front office had complete confidence in the coach, whom they could have viewed as the successor to Rod Marinelli, and “that got away” from Dallas when Eberflus left for the Indianapolis Colts in 2018.
In his time with the Colts and the Chicago Bears, Eberflus is known for having a respectable defense that can generate takeaways. That’s just not the case so far in his return to Dallas. The Cowboys have never fired a defensive coordinator during the season, and it shouldn’t happen with Eberflus. If Dallas still considers itself a playoff contender, an argument that gets harder to defend with each loss mounting, letting go of your...
