5 Cowboys Most Likely to Be Inactive Against Giants on Sunday

Markquese Bell

Between the safety room and the off-ball linebacker group, the Cowboys are going to dress plenty of backups to fill out the special teams units, and that's clearly Markquese Bell's best path to the active roster. But among both of those groups I have him as the odd man out.

Dallas has gone very thin with three linebackers (not counting the versatile Parsons) on the 53-man roster, so it's hard to see any of them being chosen as inactives.

The safety room, on the other hand, has six active players right now.

Donovan Wilson, Malik Hooker and Jayron Kearse are obvious picks to be active. They’re the top three players in the group and should all rotate in for significant playing time on defence. Israel Mukuamu became a consistent active last season, getting some time at safety and most notably playing a 67% special teams snap rate, and I expect more of the same for the 23-year-old in his third NFL season.

That narrows our conversation to Bell or Juanyeh Thomas.

The 220-pound Thomas is a more effective option to move into the box (helping with that lack of linebacking depth) and the two played almost the same number of special teams snaps in the preseason (15 for Bell, 14 for Thomas).

The added versatility makes Thomas the more valuable player to have suited up on gameday unless Bell can prove himself as a notably superior special teams option, which hasn't been the case so far.