Dallas City News

Cue the music, because it’s finally here. The 2024 NFL season is days away from kicking off, and the Dallas Cowboys – America’s Team – are preparing to start their season away from home. They’ll travel to Cleveland to take on the Browns in a game that features two playoff teams from a year ago.

The game will also mark the debut of Tom Brady the color commentator, a fitting start for the next chapter of his career considering the previous chapter was ended by the Cowboys. That surely won’t be on the Cowboys’ minds, though, as they’re eager to take the field after an offseason filled with negativity and, hopefully, change the narrative.

That won’t be easy, though. The Browns made the playoffs last year despite having five different quarterbacks start for them throughout the season. The playoff push, though, happened under veteran Joe Flacco, now with the Colts. His midseason addition brought stability to an offense that was floundering even before Deshaun Watson went down with an injury. Flacco proved to be the bus driver that head coach and play-caller Kevin Stefanski needed, but he ultimately wasn’t enough to get them past the Texans in the Wild Card round.

Now, the Browns are ready for Year 3 of the Watson era, with the hope that the third time’s the charm. At this point, the bar for Watson is on the floor, an indictment on how terrible he’s been for the Browns. Over two seasons in Cleveland, Watson has played in 12 games, completed 59.8% of his passes for 2,217 yards, and thrown 14 touchdowns to nine interceptions while running for two more touchdowns but fumbling six times.

Those are pedestrian numbers for any quarterback, made all the worse by the fact that Cleveland has paid him just over $91.3 million for that lackluster production. This was all after giving up three first-round picks and then some for the quarterback. And that’s to say nothing about the off-field problems that made Watson available in the first place.

In short, the Browns are getting dangerously close to having whiffed hard at the quarterback spot for the thousandth time in the franchise’s short, yet painful, (re-booted) history. However, the team remains strong elsewhere. Stefanski has consistently produced a great run game, even with Nick Chubb’s gruesome injury ending his season early last year. That should continue in Week 1, even with Chubb still recovering.

Last year also brought a complete revamp of the defense, as Stefanski brought in veteran coach Jim Schwartz to coordinate the defense. The results were overwhelmingly positive, as Cleveland finished second in defensive DVOA, first in EPA/play allowed, and garnered Myles Garrett his first ever Defensive Player of the Year award.

The Cowboys are a slightly different story. They have a quarterback who actually does play well – Dak Prescott was the runner-up in MVP voting last year – but is fighting tooth and nail with the front office on whether or not to pay him beyond this year. They’re bringing in a new defensive coordinator of their own, another grizzled veteran with head coaching experience in Mike Zimmer, but are doing so because their defense played so well that their previous coordinator got a head coaching job. And the run game? Well, nobody is expecting Dallas to outpace Cleveland on the ground this year, let’s just say that.

Zimmer may be inheriting a unit that played well last year, but they weren’t perfect. The run defense, in particular, was an Achilles heel that was exposed in the playoffs. The Browns run a similar scheme, Stefanski being a branch off the same Shanahan tree that Packers head coach Matt LaFleur hails from, and their track record suggests they’ll pose a difficult first test for the integrity of this run defense under Zimmer.

On the other side, the Browns’ pass rush figures to once again dominate behind Garrett this year, and Schwartz is probably licking his chops looking at the schedule this week. Dallas will be starting two rookies along their offensive line – Tyler Guyton at left tackle and Cooper Beebe at center – and both of them are playing a different position from the one they played in college. Both Guyton and Beebe played well in the preseason, earning their jobs fair and square, but an NFL debut against this pass rush unit is far from ideal.

It all fits well into the theme for this year’s Cowboys team, though: pressure unlike no other. Pressure on Zimmer to fix the run defense. Pressure on Mike McCarthy to make a playoff run. Pressure on Prescott to make the front office look foolish for not extending him by now. And pressure on Jerry and Stephen Jones to yield meaningful results in January and validate their approach to roster building at a time when fan anger is rising.

It all starts on the road in Cleveland. While the game itself doesn’t hold a ton of importance – an inter-conference road game that ultimately won’t factor greatly into playoff seeding down the road – it can help set the tone, one way or another, for how this year will go. The Cowboys are 1-3 in Week 1 under McCarthy, with the only win coming last year, so the sky won’t be falling regardless of what happens Sunday.

Still, Dallas has become the epicenter for a hurricane of constant negativity ever since that loss to Green Bay nearly eight months ago. Now, they have their first real opportunity to travel outside of that epicenter and offer fans a reason to be optimistic. It’s a tall task, given the opponent, but that will only make it mean more if the Cowboys can pull off the win.