Morning After Wk 11 - No Place Like Home
Houston Texans are the latest to destroy Cowboys in front of a defeated home crowd.
It is the same game. It is Groundhog Day.
I assume that this nightmare cannot continue forever because the Giants will visit AT&T Stadium in 10 days, and that should finally end the loop of indefinite sadness for the home fans.
Now, hold on. I am not promising a win. Nobody would be that insane.
But I am willing to submit to you that there should be competitive football on Thanksgiving Day. The odds of the very bad New York Giants coming to town and crushing the Cowboys in Dallas by three touchdowns or so seem rather unlikely.
Not impossible, mind you. Just rather unlikely.
So, that would mean the loop of indefinite sadness that the cameras catch over and over again should come to at least a temporary halt. You know, the ones where a Cowboys fan is decked out in his most eye-catching gear, only to look like he is starting to wonder why he pays so much money to make himself miserable. The crowd shots of bewildered and dismayed Cowboys fans are about the only way the television networks can get through the second half of another non-competitive football game in Dallas.
Because the Cowboys keep playing the exact same home game over and over again, and the patterns are pretty clear and obvious by now.
On Monday night, the Houston Texans became the sixth consecutive team to play at AT&T Stadium and humiliate the Cowboys in front of their home “loyalists.” I use that term loosely because the percentage of visiting fans who do not want to miss this opportunity to laugh at Jerry Jones in person is growing by the week. And, heck, the percentage of home fans who have had enough seems to be growing, too, if the signs and the booing from the various levels of the stadium are any indication.
The Texans were the opponent, and they have their own issues. But still, they were able to play a reasonably clean game with moments of brilliance and probably felt in total control from the moment Joe Mixon broke his first long touchdown run. They were never caught and certainly never trailed before winning a game by the largest margin of the season and allowing the fewest points in 2024, too.
Superlatives are reached when teams play Dallas this year. There is a matchup problem pretty much everywhere on the field, on both sides of the ball, that will not let up. Dallas has tried different things. Sometimes they have been conservative and careful; other times they have been crazy aggressive with poor gambles, and it doesn’t matter.
They simply stink at a level we are unfamiliar with. They are making us compare them to 1960, 1989, and yes, 2000. We have reached levels of despair that have almost no equal around here.
Even when they play reasonably well – relative to our expectations for Cooper Rush, the defense, or pretty much any part of this team – they still lose by three touchdowns or more. And now, it seems, the opponent is just a detail. Every opponent is too much for this team.