The high-riding 2021 Dallas Cowboys stumbled and fell hard last week against the Denver Broncos. The extreme ugliness of that loss undid a lot of confidence building from previous weeks, and now the Cowboys have to start proving themselves again in Week 10 against the Atlanta Falcons.
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. That's especially true when there's a bad history, and the last 25 years of Cowboys football have made fans and onlookers reasonably dubious whenever the team starts to look like it's on the way back up.
Part of what made last Sunday's collapse against the Broncos so frustrating was that it felt like the other shoe we'd all been waiting for. Once again, the Cowboys couldn't keep a good thing going.
Now they have to earn back some of that respect from their 6-1 start.
No, the 4-4 Atlanta Falcons aren't an elite NFL team this season. But they present an opportunity for Dallas to do what they have so far this year and should've done against Denver; handle their business against the bottom half of the league.
Like the Broncos last week, Atlanta comes to AT&T Stadium with a .500 record. But even the successful half of their season is suspect as the wins have come against the Giants, Jets, Dolphins, and a Saints team that was missing its starting quarterback.
The Falcons haven't impressed on either side of the ball in 2021. Their offense is 20th overall and 21st in scoring while the defense is 17th in yards allowed and 28th in points.
This all sounds great for Dallas but, unfortunately, we were saying the same things about the Broncos a week ago. So to think Atlanta can't come to town and do what Denver did would be pure arrogance after the atrocity we watched last Sunday.
At the very least, oddsmakers still seem to believe in the Cowboys. Dallas opened as -425 favorites and, as for the spread, the sites listed here at SportsBettingDime.com all indicate that the Boys should cover the spread by 9 points. All sites are showing the Cowboys as a sure win this week, barring any surprise changes to the starting roster.
Despite last week's letdown, Dallas is still one of the heavy favorites on the Week 10 schedule. They're getting benefit of the doubt that the Broncos game was a fluke and the real Cowboys are who we saw win six-straight games beforehand.
That credit will be used up if things don't dramatically improve against the Falcons. We were recently using words like “different” and “special” when talking about the 2021 Cowboys. The vocabulary will start shifting greatly if they don't get back to business immediately.
