Blogging The Boys
Every week, we gather to discuss the latest news about the Dallas Cowboys and seek our writer’s perspective on each headline. Welcome back to the roundtable. This week we have Sean Martin and David Howman.
Mike: Let’s give the offense a B+. The ceiling showed up in flashes, but the floor was too low, and toward the end of the season the floor was too often. Early-down inconsistency, red-zone stalls, and breakdowns in obvious pass situations made the unit feel week-to-week instead of identity-to-identity. The standout is easy here, it’s Dak Prescott. He was the stabilizer, and the fact he finished third among this year’s leading passers in yards tells you how much of the offense run through him this season.
The biggest surprise is Malik Davis giving them functional snaps when the room was thin, but that’s also the point, it was a pleasant patch, not a long-term solution.
Howman: A- for the offense. I was really impressed with the job Schotty did calling plays, and Klayton Adams was a huge addition for the run game. Dak Prescott had the best year of his career in my opinion, and he’d be the frontrunner for the MVP if this team had made the playoffs. Javonte Williams was a pleasant surprise, finally capitalizing on the potential he flashed as a rookie in Denver. The only thing that kept this offense from being an A+ for me was the issues they had with slow starts and occasionally going quiet in the second half. Consistency should be the goal for 2026.
Sean: I’ll go with an A for the offense. Call the reasoning for being two marks away from perfect whatever you want, but one of them certainly has to be a little fatigue singing the praises of a high-powered Cowboys offense that didn’t even reach the playoffs. There were times they went into a shell, had too many penalties, and couldn’t finish in the red zone to raise their grade as well. The direction under Schottenheimer is an overall positive though, as is the depth on this side of the ball to remain a strength, so the expectation for a higher grade plus better results on defense will be there in 2026.
Mike: It’s an F-minus-minus, and there’s really no polite way around it. This unit gave up a franchise-record 511 points, the first time in team history the Cowboys has ever allowed more then 500 points in a season, and it showed up weekly in busted coverages, third-down hemorrhaging, and long, demoralizing drives.
The standout was Jadeveon Clowney, who actually produced real edge disruption in the middle of the mess. The biggest surprise wasn’t one player, it was the scale of...
