How the Cowboys still ‘won’
Despite latest failure, Jones touts pandemic attendance ‘record’
Dallas opened the season as the consensus odds-on favorite, and this time the experts weren’t wrong. Few in the NFL could overcome the Cowboys’ plan. Nobody could match their will.
It helped, of course, that they were pursuing a title of which only their owner dared to dream.
“I’m going to arm-wave,” Jerry Jones said during his weekly appearance on Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday. “I think we set the world record for attendance for a venue this year at our stadium in the world of pandemic.”
This is noteworthy, to be sure, but it’s not exactly admirable. In terms of uncoveted achievements, “biggest crowd in a pandemic” ranks right up there with “most hot dogs consumed at a hunger strike” and “loudest curse words uttered during a church service.”
The champion usually is undisputed. But he shouldn’t expect those around him to be impressed.
The Cowboys opened their doors to 219,021 fans in eight combined home games this season, besting the second-place team in attendance by more than 90,000, and proving that if nothing else they’re still committed to building a spectacle.
The on-field product was a disaster, only in part because of a season-ending injury to quarterback Dak Prescott, and the new coach found something new to bungle almost every week.
On Sunday, in a visit to the New York Giants for a game that somehow had playoff implications in the worst division in pro football, Mike McCarthy decided not to challenge a questionable catch by David Pettis that set up an important Giants field goal.
On the game broadcast, the Fox announcers assumed McCarthy would challenge. At home, Cowboys fans waited for McCarthy to toss his red challenge flag onto the field. He held onto it instead.
And Monday, the day after Dallas lost 23-19 to finish the season with a 6-10 record?
“I clearly see what everybody else saw after the fact,” McCarthy told reporters, and he might as well have been talking about more than one replay.
Even in retrospect, McCarthy said he doesn’t think he would have changed his mind about the challenge, and that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who watched the Cowboys all year. He’s not one to second-guess himself, whether it’s about hiring a friend who hadn’t been a coordinator in six years to lead his defense, or about calling one of the worst fake punts in Thanksgiving history.
In that regard, McCarthy isn’t so different than theman who hired him. During his radio appearance Tuesday, Jones wouldn’t even hear of the suggestion that he might have picked the wrong coach last offseason.
“We haven’t even taken almost the first few steps out of the gate with Mike McCarthy, and his philosophy, and what he can bring to the table,” Jones said. “The gates have just jumped open.”
Meanwhile, the horse hasn’t noticed yet. Yes, the Cowboys were hurt by making a coaching change and installing a new system at a time when COVID-19 protocols reduced the amount of time the staff could spend with players. And yes, McCarthy got hit with some brutal injury luck, most notably to the franchise quarterback.
But two other teams that hired new coaches in 2020 — Cleveland and Washington — are in the playoffs. And it’s hard not to notice that the team that fired Jason
Garrett for going 8-8 once too often would have won the division if they’d managed to do that again.
“It makes me sick,” Jones said of missing another postseason, and apparently not even a world pandemic record can soothe all illnesses.
So now the Cowboys find themselves about where they were a year ago, with a coach who still has a lot to prove, and a huge looming Prescott decision that won’t go away.
Unable to agree on the terms of a contract extension last spring, the Cowboys decided to play this season with Prescott under the franchise tag. If they can’t agree this time, they can resort to the same move.
But seeing how the offense struggled without him did not make Prescott any cheaper.
“I don’t know how you could have anymore leverage,” Jones said of Prescott. “His evolving into an NFL quarterback has been nothing short of a perfect picture.”
With Jones, the picture is what matters. He likes the image of a winner, sure, and knows Prescott can help him perpetuate that. But he also likes the image of America’s Team drawing a crowd, even when few other professional sports teams can bring themselves to seek one.
So even though McCarthy’s team underachieved this season, that’s not necessarily true of Jones’ franchise. In the race for a world record, the Cowboys won again.
Just like everyone figured they would.