Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys were thoroughly outmatched on Sunday night against the Minnesota Vikings, a team that found out just hours before kickoff that their 2025 season was over for all intents and purposes after being eliminated from the playoffs.
Meanwhile, the Cowboys knew before the game that their playoff hopes were clinging to life support. They had to win their final four games, and even if they pulled that off they were not guaranteed anything. Still though, in the name of controlling what you can control, it was their chance to prove that they were ready to fight to the end. That didn’t happen.
Here is our Stock Report from the fallout. It is an almost-fully down type of event.
As noted, this was a game that the Cowboys had to have. They knew it. We knew it. Everyone knew it.
Dallas was coming off of a Thursday game and had the mini-bye to rest up and prepare for their final sprint where they needed to run their race and hope for help outside of it. But as we sat down hoping to see a 10-round fight for a playoff spot over the next few weeks, the Cowboys got knocked out in the first. They didn’t even make it to inside of a week to Christmas for the party to be over.
We can understand and rationalize that this is not easy. The Cowboys are trying to do something difficult and were trying to climb out of a huge hole (a self-inflicted one to be clear).
But these last two weeks have undone some of the good will that Brian Schottenheimer earned for powering his team through the previous three wins (talking about football to be clear here, obviously this team has been dealing with a tragedy that transcends a game). It is harder to look back on the three wins and feel like they were stout and not more of a result of an Eagles team struggling with their identity and the Chiefs falling apart (oh and the Raiders). Brian Schottenheimer had a chance to pass the test on Sunday, passing in general would have been fine, and he flunked it. His team was unprepared and he was conservative to make things even worse.
I do not enjoy ever calling for anyone to be dismissed, but I have no idea how the Cowboys are continuing to go at this. Eberflus has had a mostly terrible season and while he deserves the context of having his best player traded away before the season began, that does not justify things like rushing three players on a critical fourth down.
The comparisons here to Mike Nolan are obvious and this situation feels like that one in that it cannot go on any longer. The Cowboys have a huge defensive problem, and just allowed a quarterback in J.J. McCarthy who is just now learning the game to waltz all over them.
What?...
