Cowboys Pregame Three Thoughts for Week 11
A date in Charlotte with the 1-win Carolina Panthers to try to keep moving.
There have been 15 games in the NFL this year with a double-digit point spread through ten weeks. Dallas is a 10.5-point favorite this week at Carolina and are one of three games this week with such a spread (Miami and San Francisco are also double-digit favorites) and there is a thing we should know about these truths. The favorite is just 6-8-1 against the spread. Further, home dogs of double-digit points are 3-0 against the spread and 2-1 outright. Cleveland beat San Francisco and Arizona beat Dallas (in the biggest road favorite game of the year when Dallas was favored by 13), both while being expected to be run out of their own stadium.
In other words, this isn’t college football. When you see a big double-digit road point spread in the NFL, you should probably run the other direction. The good news is Dallas probably can remember all the way back to Week 3 as it prepares to deal with many similar details this week in Charlotte.
Dallas plays at Carolina at noon Central time on Sunday.
These are my Pregame Three Thoughts:
When Dallas has the ball:
– The Cowboys are planning on getting Tony Pollard going this week and it would be good to see him playing well here down the stretch.
Dallas doesn’t hide these things very well when they talk and you could see the last month that they can nearly call their shots about who is going to get the ball each week in the offense. It seems pretty obvious now that CeeDee and Jake Ferguson have been declared the “go to” guys and Brandin Cooks and Michael Gallup both were boosted in morale recently, that now everyone wants Pollard to know nobody has forgotten about him. That is why we highlighted him this week in our graphic that Skyler makes for us. When he made it, several of these Panthers starters still looked in, but now it appears CJ Henderson is out and Xavier Woods may be out, too. They are already down Jaycee Horn, Jeremy Chinn, Shaq Thompson, and Justin Houston. It is not a great year for Carolina to put a team on the field.
Regardless, we do like a lot of what Dallas is doing offensively, but at some point very soon, they are going to wish they could move the ball on the ground well again. In particular, they want to feel like their franchise tag RB, Tony Pollard can get moving.