Dallas Cowboys’ problem isn’t the tired “lack of preparation” but something else
We have heard the saying so often during a football game that it makes us numb, but the accusation enrages the senses.
Take a football team, say the Dallas Cowboys, and they are playing just plain awful in the first quarter, which they have perfected in 2020.
Color Announcer A says, “I gotta tell you, Bob, they’re so bad it makes you want to never watch football again. They weren’t prepared, and they didn’t come ready to play.”
The accusation is as an indictment of the players, but the meat of the statement points squarely at the head coach.
Is the criticism accurate?
“I think it’s such a general opinion to throw out. I don’t know the basis of what that would be applied,” Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said Thursday when I posed that question.
The basis of the opinion originates on teams that play like trash in the first quarter. You know ... like his Cowboys.
No team wakes up uglier more than McCarthy’s Cowboys, who are so bad in the first quarter they make the rest of 2020 look good.
* They have not taken a 7-0 lead.
* They have led only one time after the first quarter, 14-7, in an eventual loss to the Cleveland Browns.
* The Cowboys have been outscored 57-26 in the first quarter.
* The Cowboys defense has forced one first-quarter turnover. That was Week 2, when Seahawks receiver DK Metcalf was an idiot and careless with the ball as he was heading into the endzone, allowing Cowboys defensive back Trevon Diggs to punch the ball out for a touchback.
* In the first quarter, the Cowboys have committed four turnovers, and opposing defenses have returned an interception for a touchdown and forced a safety.
* In the first five games, the Cowboys offense has scored three first-quarter touchdowns with two field goals.
As my late father-in-law, Jim, said: Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?
“I’ll tell you what I told the team,” McCarthy said Thursday. “Any time something good or bad happens, it’s a moment. Happens twice, it’s a pair. Three times it’s a sequence. It happens four times it’s definitely a pattern.”
This is no longer a pattern as much as it is a character flaw.
Dak Prescott was also the starting quarterback in all of these wretched starts.
Law of averages says some of this garbage will be taken out.
To suggest, however, that a crud first quarter means the team is unprepared to play because of its head coach, or his staff, is a reach.
“A lot of it is mental state of mind and certainly it’s a coaches’ job to get the players in a good mental disposition to play well,” University of Georgia coach Kirby Smart said when I posed to him the same question.
“A lot more of it has to do with what caused that turnover? What caused the mental error. Was it the other team? Was it the speed of the game? Was it the contact the guy made with the ball to knock it out?
“There are a lot of things that you could point to. If you go out and call three timeouts on the first drive, you weren’t mentally ready. Just because you turn the ball over early doesn’t necessarily mean you weren’t ready to play, it means they affected you in a way you weren’t prepared for.”
Former Dallas Cowboys fullback Daryl “Moose” Johnston was a member of teams that blew out opponents in the ‘90s. No one ever accused the ‘90s Cowboys as being unprepared to play.
As a broadcaster for Fox, he’s not buying this lame line either.
“You’re saying that a staff went through a week of preparation and didn’t put everything into it? That doesn’t make sense to me,” Moose told me. “What I saw [Cowboys against Atlanta in Week 2], was a team that was incredibly aggressive in attacking the football. It was really good defensive football.
“Lack of preparation? This year, I don’t think you can say that.”
Since I’ve got Moose on the phone, surely he can define what “They didn’t come prepared to play” means.
“I’m the same as you— I have no idea,” he said. “You have to trust all of your individual players are prepared. Are some staffs better than others at getting teams ready? Yes. Those are the teams we see in the playoffs.”
Mike McCarthy’s Green Bay Packers made the playoffs in nine out of 13 seasons.
“To say a team didn’t execute is a whole different thing. That’s what I’d like to hear,” Johnston said. “We had games like that during our run. Do you really think we didn’t prepare hard when we fell behind 21-0 in the [1994] NFC Championship game in San Francisco? It’s not a lack of preparation it’s a lack of execution.”
However you want to cut it, the 2020 Dallas Cowboys are terrible in the first quarter, and McCarthy knows it.
They’re prepared. They’re trying.
They’re just bad at it in the first 15 minutes.
