At the start of this NFL season, a lot of Dallas Cowboy fans from around the country were saying “this is our year.”
After all, last season, America’s Team won their division, made the playoffs, and before this season started, signed a $60 million per year contract with quarterback Dak Prescott – so the future looked bright.
But here we are about halfway through the schedule now and those high hopes have been almost entirely dashed. Right now the Cowboys have a record of 3-5 and likely will not make it to the postseason.
Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew Beaton recently published a story explaining how he thinks “the Dallas Cowboys turned into the NFL’s most surprising mess.” He joined the Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s begin with the idea of what were the expectations for the Dallas Cowboys coming into this season? What was the buzz outside of Texas?
Andrew Beaton: The buzz, I think it was pretty high. You know, this is a team that has won double digit games for several consecutive seasons.
And they locked up CeeDee Lamb. They locked up Dak Prescott, who was just coming off a year when he finished second in MVP voting. And so I think it felt like, all right, this is the time for the Cowboys to actually make that postseason run that has remained elusive.
Well, I mentioned the Cowboys are now at 3-5. That sounds to me like they may be already outside of the playoff picture. What’s gone wrong?
Yeah, and the playoff hopes look especially grim now that Dak Prescott has suffered a hamstring injury and looks like he’s going to miss at least several games.
But one of the things the Dallas Cowboys had enjoyed over the past several years was that so many of their best players had been extremely cheap. Prescott wasn’t costing a ton relative to other quarterbacks in the league. CeeDee Lamb wasn’t costing a ton. Micah Parsons, their star pass rusher…
And so a number of things have gone wrong, including guys like Parsons getting hurt. But they’ve also now had to reckon with the idea that when you have some of the best players in the league, they’re going to cost a whole bunch. And so while they brought back Dak, while they locked up CeeDee lamb, the cost of keeping these players is skyrocketing. And in a league with a salary cap, that starts to mean you have to make some difficult decisions.
And we’ve seen that at a couple offensive lineman left in free agency and the line hasn’t been nearly as perfect as it had been in the past few years. They let Tony Pollard leave for the Tennessee Titans and the running game has been a problem. And so in a way, there’s a lot of explanations – ranging from injuries to perhaps even coaching. But sometimes it just comes down to money.
Let’s talk about that money just a bit. It sounded like you were saying that the Cowboys had done a pretty good job of managing their costs. But with Dak Prescott’s contract, we’re talking about, taken together at four years, $240 million. I guess some people wonder if the Cowboys didn’t overpay.
Yeah, and it’s just the trend that’s been in the quarterback market these days, when you have guys going for $50-plus million, and he obviously set a new high.
But that’s actually a problem that boiled down to leverage for the Cowboys because usually teams can exert their will a little bit against a quarterback because they don’t want to play out years on a franchise tag. Well, the Dallas Cowboys didn’t have that option with Dak Prescott, and they knew that if they didn’t lock him up to an extension, that he would likely hit free agency this upcoming offseason.
And so he was really the one with the leverage here. And who knows what a quarterback like him would have gotten on the open market. But it very well might have been more than $60 million just because quarterbacks of his caliber at his age so rarely hit free agency.
Well, perhaps in the last minute and a half or so we have here, we should turn to another team that hadn’t been generating quite as many bad vibes. I’m talking about the Houston Texans, currently 6-3 in the top of their division.
I don’t want to jinx anything because last time we were talking about the Texans a few months back, it was right before they started losing a few games. But with the Texans 6-3 and top of their division, you think they’ve got a chance to make a deep run into the playoffs or maybe even a shot at the Super Bowl?
You know, it might be a little early in their timeline for that, but I think any Texans fan can be thrilled that they have a quarterback like C.J. Stroud in town who had just an extraordinary rookie season.
And it hasn’t been quite as electric this year, but we’re also looking at someone who’s missing Nico Collins, who’s down with an injury. They added Stefon Diggs, now he’s hurt, too.
And so I think we’re going to have a much better sense of where the Texans are later in this season when we see what a healthier team looks like. Because if that passing attack can be more what it was like last year, then they’re a team that I don’t think anybody really wants to face.
