What a crazy game last night. Somehow throughout all the chaos, the Dallas Cowboys managed to scoot past the Seattle Seahawks in a nail bitting score of 26-27. What did the Cowboys do right to win this game, or, perhaps more importantly what did the Cowboys do wrong in this game?
Let’s first start with the number of yards gathered by each team. For the third straight game, the opponent had gained more yards than the Cowboys. The Seahawks had 328 yards while the Cowboys had 286. How do the Cowboys keep winning with fewer yards?
In this game the answer to that question is turnovers. The Seahawks had a total of 5 turnovers in the game with three coming from their starting Quarterback Drew Lock. His performance was so bad that Coach Pete Carroll had to come out and say that Geno Smith will be the new starting quarterback for the team.
Upon the downfall of the Seattle Seahawks, let’s take a look at how the Cowboys did.
Quarterback Will Grier threw for 88 yards and two touchdowns in the game. Much better performance than at the beginning of the year. Grier could have thrown for more yards in the game but the two touchdowns were critical to the Cowboys victory. Another impressive stat is how the Cowboys managed to win while the Seahawks had their starters playing for most of the game.
Now yes I know the Seahawks as a team are not very good this year upon losing Russell Wilson. However, when just about all the Cowboy players on the field are backups, you know that the team had to play well to win. Now even with that said we can not ignore the poor performances in this game.
The Cowboys need to realize that they can not keep winning games by having fewer yards than the other team. Last week against the Los Angeles Chargers, KaVontae Turpin was the hero scoring two touchdowns to help win the game. This week it was the huge amount of turnovers the Seahawks handed to the Cowboys.
Forcing turnovers is good and the Cowboys did a very good job with that defensively, but the lack of offense is frightening. The Cowboys will be going up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in week one and will for sure need to improve their offense in order to win that game.
With all of this knowledge that has come out of the Cowboys preseason, fans will be eager to see what they have in store for the first week of the regular season. If players stay healthy and the offense looks better then winning will become more of a habit in the league.
