Saturday’s Preseason game against the San Francisco 49ers didn’t go very well for the Dallas Cowboys and this area in particular is a concern.
As all of us know, it’s not about the final score in preseason football. If you’re like me, you’re unbelievably annoyed when a fan of another team asks me in the preseason, “so did the Dallas Cowboys win yesterday?” – knowing full well they did not. And ultimately exposing their ignorance of preseason football at the same time.
So while the final score may not matter, “scoring” kinda does. And as the nine points indicate, Dallas failed to score single touchdown all day. Not exactly what we want to see from a team that struggled in the red zone all last season. And not something we expected from what we considered to be the deepest Dallas roster in recent memory.
Not play-calling
In the preseason, offensive coordinators call an extremely vanilla game. They don’t scheme to specific opponents like the regular season, and they’re operating from a script in order to evaluate specific players.
In a battle of the backups, we expected our squad to dominate.
As such, we shouldn’t be worried when the Dallas Cowboys call a play that runs right into the strength of the opponent. We shouldn’t worry when drives stall here of there either. It comes with the territory of the preseason.
Depth a problem
Instead of the play-calling, the blame largely falls on individual execution. Again, this is concerning because many of us in Cowboys Nation consider this to be the deepest team we’ve had in over a decade. In a battle of the backups, we expected our squad to dominate.
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The starting offense (sans Ezekiel Elliott, Amari Cooper and Jason Witten) looked pretty darn good. They stalled in the red zone, but they looked to be pretty dynamic. They passed the ball on first down and even took a shot downfield (which drew the flag). Blake Jarwin, who will be a big weapon in 2019, looked like a major mismatch downfield and someone the Cowboys intend to use often.
But beyond the starters, things didn’t look great on either side of the ball. We saw Dallas’ running backs struggle. We saw our D-line struggle to stop opposing RBs. We saw our back up QBs bomb. And our WR depth struggled to get open and when they did, they dropped the ball (looking at you training camp standout, Jon’vea Johnson).
Even the Dallas Cowboys kicker looked terrible, picking up right where he left off last season, and missing from close range.
The final score isn’t a problem, but the game was. The Dallas Cowboys depth looked terrible and failed to do much of anything on Saturday. I still think this is a deep team, but I’m going to listen to those glowing training camp reports with a suspicious ear from now on.
- Published on 08/12/2019 at 12:40 PM
- Last updated at 08/12/2019 at 12:20 PM