Dallas City News

The Dallas Cowboys are riding a two-game losing streak with the bye sandwiched in the middle so morale has been quite low for almost a month. Winning, as they say, cures all, so hopefully the team is able to come out on top of the Atlanta Falcons and calm everything down for a little bit.

Before we fully move on to the future we need to look to history. To be clear we are talking about significant history, all of it to be matter of fact.

Something we do every week here at BTB is examine the game that was just recently played through the lens of franchise history. Tools such as Stathead and Pro Football Reference make this possible and as much fun as that is, that is pretty much where the fun is going to stop.

Things are quite bad.

This team cannot break 80 yards rushing which is a pretty bad sign

Through Week 8 the Cowboys have had 80 or fewer rushing yards in five of their seven games played. Consider that they are already tied for the sixth-most games of such variety in an entire season and still have 10 games to go. One more puts them in company with the worst rushing team in franchise history (we’ll get to them in just a minute) and the 2013 version that was stuck grounded as well.

Speaking of 1989!

Once again… 1989 is coming into view from a rushing perspective

The Cowboys are sitting on 519 total team rushing yards through the first seven games of the season. There is only one team in all of franchise history who has been less successful to the same point in their season and it was in fact the team in Jerry Jones’ first year of ownership.

It cannot be said enough that holding company with the 1989 version of the Dallas Cowboys is a very bad thing. That was quite the lost year.

Ezekiel Elliott is off to one of the worst individual starts this team has ever seen

Obviously the subject of Ezekiel Elliott has been a touchy one for some fans as it is difficult to disconnect from the glory moments of the past that he provided. Unfortunately it is becoming more and more clear that he is not the player in 2024 that he once was.

Consider that there are only three instances (since 1970 to be specific) in franchise history of a player having at least 45 carries with 150 or fewer rushing yards in their first seven games of the season with the Cowboys. Ezekiel Elliott is now the third.

You will recall that 2013 was Joseph Randle’s rookie year and that the 2013 season is the one the Cowboys are on the verge of matching with games having 80 or fewer rushing yards as an overall group.

The Cowboys are on pace for the worst kind of NFL history

Back to the 80 yards thing, I found this note to be particularly concerning.

The Cowboys have actually had 70 or fewer total team yards rushing four times (so we lose one game from the previous sample) and what makes those four games alarming is the amount of total team rushing yards allowed by the team.

In all four of those games the Cowboys have allowed 180+ total team rushing yards from their opponents. This means that on four different occasions, through only seven games, the Cowboys have had themselves 70 or fewer yards rushing and allowed 180 or more on the other side of the ball.

The NFL record for most occurrences of this kind in a season by a team is six and the Cowboys are right there! With 10 games left!

Dak Prescott is riding a three-game streak with multiple interceptions

Dak Prescott is playing some awful football right now and that is really evidenced by the amount of interceptions he has thrown. Consider that he has multiple interceptions in three straight games now, a very legitimate sample size.

The Cowboys actually won the first game in which this occurred, but this sort of thing is pretty rare. Amazingly, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield is also in the middle of an identical streak, but it only happened once last season across the entire league. It only happened twice in each year before that.

There is no excuse for turning the ball over like this and what’s more is these are all horrible interceptions, not unfortunate tips or happenstances working against Prescott.

Force-feeding CeeDee Lamb sounds good, but may not be wise

CeeDee Lamb had 17 targets on Sunday night and the immediate thought was that surely this was an outlier as far as his career is concerned. That is a ton. It turns out that assumption was way, way off.

Thanks to the recent outing from Lamb, the NFL as a whole has now seen a streak of seven consecutive games where a team loses when having a player with at least 17 targets in the contest. Amazingly, Lamb appears on the list twice. Sunday night is there as well as the playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers.

But what’s more is that the most recent two instances of a team winning with a player having 17+ targets was when it happened to the Dallas Cowboys and CeeDee Lamb! There is absolutely no question that Lamb deserves to be targeted and that he can turn them into something special, but this does suggest that hyper-focusing on one player may be unwise for clubs.

Playoffs look impossible based on franchise history

It felt fitting to take a look at the state of the franchise relative to playoff hopes, not because they seem possible, but just because that’s par for the course.

There have been 19 previous instances of a Dallas Cowboys team having three or fewer wins through the first seven contests of a season (obviously this team is 3-4 at the moment).

Only once in those 19 times did a Dallas Cowboys team go on to make the playoffs. As you are likely well-aware that team fell to 3-4, traded for Amari Cooper as the bye week began, lost his first game to fall to 3-5 and then miraculously rallied to become the only team on this list to reach the tournament. They even won a playoff game!

It appears as if no help like that is on the way for the current team, though.