The Morning After Wk 11 - Restoring of Order
Dallas continued its winning ways by checking the boxes to get a win out of Charlotte.
There are some winning performances over the course of a career that a player never forgets. These are the brief mind photographs that get saved until one might go through them in a rocking chair, remembering those days that will always be with you.
And then there are days like yesterday in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Nobody will spend much time remembering this game.
The Cowboys had a few obvious objectives that we can safely assume entering this short week of Sunday football, three days off, and Thursday football. Nobody should be more familiar with this than they are after all of these years of Thanksgivings and being one of the main centerpieces of the holiday since 1966. We can say the league plays more Thursday football than ever before and that is correct, but those other dates are all night games, whereas the short week is even shorter for this game week as it is a Thursday that is set up like a Sunday. So, don’t let Sunday take more out of you than you must. Get the victory and get out of Dodge.
Win in a quick and decisive fashion by playing a simple and clean game.
Get through the game in as healthy a way as possible.
Get on the plane and back to Dallas.
A few years ago, Dallas lost both halves of this Thanksgiving crunch as the league had them playing at Kansas City on that Sunday, which certainly does not allow for a team to go through its paces so easily. That year, 2021, Dallas lost to the Chiefs and then returned home beat up and lost to the Raiders a few days later. That represents the only time in the last three seasons that Dallas has followed up a loss under Mike McCarthy with another loss.
This year, it is during a stretch where Dallas is about to be double-digit favorites for three consecutive weeks. This rarely happens in the NFL and when it does it is for a team that everyone thinks is going to the Super Bowl. Somehow, it seems that the Cowboys are in this interesting spot where nobody is sure how good they are but also they are lining up opponents in a sequence where nobody thinks they will play a single-digit game. It is altogether perplexing to get a feel on the 2023 Dallas Cowboys.
Sunday was yet another example of a game where the Cowboys did not feel as if it was playing its best brand of football by any sort of measure and yet also didn’t feel like it was breaking much of a sweat. Carolina is in no shape to push a playoff team around and while they were hoping to get Dallas to play into their hands with some mistakes, Dallas did not oblige.