Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys lost on Thursday night and it is going to be a tough one to get over as they seemingly had it right within their grasp. Unfortunately for all of us, we have nothing but time to let it dissipate as we have to wait a week and a half for Dallas to play next with the season-opener taking place on a Thursday. At least we have plenty of football between now and then to help.
As we look back on what happened against the Philadelphia Eagles it is always nice to do so through the lens of both franchise and NFL history. Thanks to incredible resources like Pro Football Reference and Stathead we can run searches for specific things to help mine through the haystack.
Let’s begin.
People offer all sorts of quips about Jalen Hurts and his abilities as a passer. We are not here to discuss that today, but what we are here to do is note that the Cowboys had 24 points scored against them while Hurts “only” threw for 152 yards. That isn’t exactly common.
These are all the games this century for the Cowboys in which these thresholds were met. You can see that there are very few wins and that among them lie some of our most treasured memories (Tony Romo at Buffalo in 2007 or him again at San Francisco in 2011 when he punctured his lung).
You can give the Cowboys defense some credit for limiting things through the air, although they certainly got gashed a bit on the ground early on.
Obviously Dak Prescott could have had a better statistical night if some things had gone differently, but from a factual standpoint, it was what it was.
In a literal sense, Dak finished with over 180 passing yards (188) and a completion percentage north of 60% (61.8%). He did this without throwing a single touchdown or interception.
This was only the fifth time that Prescott threaded that particular type of statistical needle and the first in a very long time. The last instance of this weird collection of things occurring was six years ago when Dallas dropped their third game in a row in a loss to the New York Jets.
In a literal sense (that’s what statistics are after all) Jalen Tolbert had multiple targets. He had two, to be clear.
Tolbert reeled in exactly one of his targets on the night and did so for exactly zero yards. That makes for an interesting stat line: 2 targets, 1 reception, 0 yards.
Speaking in this matter-of-fact way, Tolbert became only the 12th player in franchise history to record multiple targets, catch at least one of them and have no yards to show for it. For what it’s worth, the list has some pretty solid names on it!
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