As they should, Cowboys cruise

By Anthony Bialy  |   Tuesday, October 02, 2007  |  Comments( 2 )

Dallas Cowboys
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Go ahead and throw the dodgeball at the plump kid wearing the World of Warcraft t-shirt. Wait until he's taking a hit from his asthma inhaler if you'd like, too. At its core, sports are a brutal business where the mighty are expected to crush the feeble, and Dallas illustrated such when it did what was both expected and supposed to do against the reeling, diminished Rams last weekend.

An already troubled team hobbled even more seriously by the losses of Steven Jackson and Orlando Pace, not to mention one featuring a bruised Marc Bulger, didn't put up anything resembling a battle when it visited the Cowboys in Week 4. As anticipated, Dallas looked like a grizzly toying with a rabbit before sending it to bunny heaven.

The amount of territory gained by the hosts reflected the carnage. Dallas' 502 net yards sounds like the total an SEC school would accumulate against Temple. But this extensive ground was captured against a genuine NFL team, albeit one currently immersed in chaos and misery. Quarterback Tony Romo picked up a superlative 10.3 yards per pass attempt, a telling statistic that indicates he was basically making completions at will.

The magnificent gains made by Dallas' offense look even huger when compared to the paltry 187 yards the Rams tallied during Week 4. The visitors had 11 possessions, eight of which concluded with punts; a missed field goal, a single-play drive consisting of a kneel down right before the half and an interception were the respective end results of the three non-punting drives, a miserable collection of shoddy plays that unsurprisingly ended up with the offending team being shut out on offense.

St. Louis' sole score came on special teams, with Dante Hall providing his side's lone positive highlight with a punt return for a touchdown; he can make the X in the end zone all he'd like, but it's too bad for the Rams that he couldn't have returned, say, another four or five of those in Irving, Texas.

The 85 yards Hall gained on that punt return were the equivalent of about 45 percent of the offense's output for the whole game, an indication that the Cowboys comfortably clamped down on any St. Louis attempt to move the ball. Also by comparison, the Rams gained a remarkably meager 3.7 yards per play, less than half of Dallas' 7.6 average in the same category. Most importantly, the huge gap simultaneously demonstrates the way that the Cowboys dominated both sides of the ball.

The one thing that's apparent from watching the 2007 Cowboys is that Romo is playing with both confidence and joy. That's easy to do when you're the leader of an offense scoring 37.8 points per game. Detractors can point out that some of these points were scored against an 0-4 St. Louis team that, mildly, is having a down year. But that's what undefeated teams are supposed to do when they face winless ones: stomp away until the adversary drops.

The Cowboys can't control which teams they face, so all they can do each game is put both their firepower and stopping power on display to a league that knows this is going to be a tough team to conquer, regardless of the quality of any week's particular competition.
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About Anthony Bialy

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