The Dallas Cowboys are not a Super Bowl team, and a previously winless team just proved it using a backup quarterback nobody outside Lawrence, Kansas had heard of three months ago.
Tampa Bay beat Dallas 24-16 on Thursday Night Football, and the roster math behind that score is the real story. The Buccaneers were 0-4 walking into AT&T Stadium. Their starting quarterback, Baker Mayfield, is out with a dislocated thumb, and the guy who beat Dallas in his place was Jalon Daniels, an undrafted rookie out of Kansas making just his second career NFL start — his first ended in a 17-14 loss to Green Bay back in Week 4. That’s the opponent that walked in and handed the team people still had picked deep into January its signature gut-punch loss of the season.
Playoff-caliber teams clean up exactly this kind of game against exactly this level of competition, and Dallas couldn’t.
Dak Prescott threw two interceptions, both on tipped balls, and the second one, intercepted by Alex Anzalone in the final two minutes, sealed it. Daniels threw zero. A guy who signed as a street free agent after six years at Kansas just outdueled a quarterback getting paid like a top-five player in the sport, in the one column that actually decides close games. George Pickens caught a 13-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter to make it interesting, and it still wasn’t enough, because Bucky Irving kept ripping off chunks on the ground, 165 yards rushing including a 72-yarder that set up the go-ahead score, and scored twice himself — once on the ground, once through the air.
What actually bugs me about this one isn’t the box score. I have zero rooting interest in either of these teams (I’m a Jets fan, so my relationship with quarterback competence is purely theoretical), and even I can tell you tipped-ball interceptions happen to everybody. Bad luck is real, and balls deflect. Prescott isn’t the only quarterback in football who’s had a pass bounce the wrong way off a receiver’s hands.
But that’s the complication, not the excuse. Mayfield going down created the softest possible landing spot for a defense to feast on, and Dallas still couldn’t close it out against a rookie who’d started exactly one other NFL game in his life. Good teams don’t just survive disaster against good competition. They finish off the free stuff against overmatched competition, and on Thursday night Dallas left the door wide open for the one team in the building that had actually earned the underdog tag.
The internet noticed immediately.
https://twitter.com/NFLMemes/status/2108403349280161928
Todd Bowles has already confirmed Daniels keeps the job for as long as Mayfield’s out, which means an undrafted rookie making his second career start now has a better recent win than Dak Prescott does.
Dallas falls to 2-3. The Buccaneers, losers of everything before Thursday, aren’t winless anymore, and they got there with Baker Mayfield watching from the sideline and George Pickens unable to save Dallas by himself, which is the most Cowboys outcome available.
https://twitter.com/NFLonFOX/status/2108415940614590628
Enjoy the group chats this weekend, Dallas fans. They are not going to be kind.
