Some of It Was Real

A week ago, we asked a fairly simple question.

Was it real?

Dallas had beaten Washington 37–20. The offense looked more comfortable. The defense showed signs of life. Dak Prescott looked like Dak Prescott. And for the first time this season, the Cowboys gave us something resembling evidence that this team might actually be finding itself.

Then came Baltimore.

The answer after a 34–31 loss in Rio is considerably more complicated.

Some of it was real.

That's what makes this one hurt.

Dallas didn't spend Sunday hanging around with a superior football team and hoping for a lucky bounce. There were stretches when the Cowboys looked capable of beating Baltimore outright. They ran the football. They moved the chains. They answered adversity. They produced explosive plays. They made one of the best short-yardage defensive stands we've seen from this team in a while.

And then, every time the Cowboys seemed ready to take control of the game, somebody reached over and handed Baltimore the steering wheel again.

Sometimes it was a player.

Sometimes it was a penalty.

Sometimes it was a coach.

By the time Tyler Loop's 56-yard field goal sailed through with one second remaining, Dallas hadn't simply lost a football game.

The Cowboys had exhausted almost every available method of giving one away.

The Part We Shouldn't Lose Sight Of

Start with Javonte Williams.

After two weeks of struggling to establish much of a running game, Dallas finally found one. Williams carried 19 times for 98 yards and a touchdown, averaging 5.2 yards per carry. More importantly, the numbers looked like the football: Williams ran with patience, balance and violence, and Dallas' offensive line was creating places for him to go.

The opening possession should have announced what kind of afternoon this might become.

Williams was averaging 7.3 yards per carry as Dallas marched toward Baltimore's goal line. The Cowboys reached second-and-goal from the 1.

And Williams never touched the ball again.

Two passes later—one incomplete, one ending in a sack—Dallas kicked a field goal.

That sequence will deservedly become part of the Brian Schottenheimer discussion. We'll get to that separately, because it deserves more than a paragraph buried inside another story.

For now, remember what came before it:

Dallas was moving Baltimore.

That mattered.

So did Dak Prescott.

His final numbers—25 of 40 for 276 yards—don't tell the entire story. Prescott kept Dallas functioning as the game swung violently away from them, and when the Cowboys needed to come back, he helped bring them back.

CeeDee Lamb finished with 112 receiving yards. George Pickens added 82. Dallas wasn't surviving on busted plays and Baltimore mistakes. The Cowboys were creating offense against a team we specifically identified beforehand as the first real test of whether the Washington performance traveled.

It traveled.

Not cleanly.

But it traveled.

Then There Was Jaishawn Barham

There are plays that look good in a box score.

And then there are plays that make you sit up.

Baltimore put Derrick Henry in position to get inches near the Dallas goal line.

Jaishawn Barham stopped him.

Not chased him down. Not arrived after somebody else slowed him.

Stopped him.

Dallas' rookie linebacker met one of the most physically imposing running backs of his generation and helped turn Baltimore away on fourth down.

For a defense dealing with injuries and young players being forced into larger roles, that's more than a nice highlight.

That's something you file away.

Because when we're trying to determine what pieces of this team might matter in November, December and beyond, Barham is beginning to give us an answer.

And he wasn't the only young player asked to survive circumstances that were far from ideal.

Dallas entered the game already missing defensive personnel and had to keep adjusting as the afternoon went along. That doesn't excuse every breakdown.

It does provide context for them.

And Yet They Kept Giving It Back

This is where the story changes.

Jake Ferguson lost a fumble.

A Terence Steele holding penalty erased a significant third-down conversion to George Pickens and eventually helped turn what had been a promising Dallas possession into a blocked 59-yard Brandon Aubrey attempt.

Baltimore immediately responded with a touchdown.

Dallas fought back.

Then Dallas found another way to hurt itself.

That's the maddening part of this game. There isn't one play we can circle and say, There. That's why Dallas lost.

There are several.

Ferguson's turnover mattered.

Steele's penalty mattered.

The blocked field goal mattered.

The first goal-line sequence mattered.

The last goal-line sequence mattered.

And the final seven seconds certainly mattered.

Any one of them going differently might have been enough.

Dallas didn't need all of those plays back.

It needed one or two.

Two Yards

And then came the possession we'll probably be discussing all week.

Dallas drove to Baltimore's 2-yard line late in a 31–28 game.

First-and-goal.

Two yards separated Dallas from taking the lead.

Williams was sitting on 98 rushing yards.

And again, the Cowboys didn't hand him the football.

Then Luke Schoonmaker false-started.

Suddenly second-and-goal from the 2 became second-and-goal from the 7. The geometry changed. The playbook changed. Baltimore knew Dallas was considerably more likely to throw.

The Cowboys never recovered.

Prescott eventually threw the third-down ball away, Aubrey tied the game at 31, and Schottenheimer later acknowledged that he needed to give his quarterback better calls. He also described part of his handling of Prescott during that sequence as “overcoaching.”

Williams, for his part, said afterward that he supported the coaches and their decisions.

That's what a good teammate says.

The rest of us are allowed to wonder why a running back who had gained 98 yards wasn't given an opportunity to gain two more.

Seven Seconds

Even after all of that, Dallas still hadn't lost.

Seven seconds remained.

Overtime seemed inevitable.

Dallas had used shorter kickoffs during the game but elected to send this one through the end zone, giving Baltimore the ball at its 35.

One timeout.

Seven seconds.

Lamar Jackson needed one completion.

He found Zay Flowers for 27 yards.

Baltimore called timeout with one second remaining.

Loop came out.

Fifty-six yards.

Game.

A shorter kick wouldn't have guaranteed anything. But Dallas voluntarily chose the scenario in which Baltimore needed exactly the thing its offense—and Dallas' battered defense—was most capable of producing.

One completion.

That's all it took.

So—Was It Real?

Yes.

Some of it was.

That's the strange conclusion from a game Dallas absolutely should be sick about losing.

The running game was real.

The fight was real.

Lamb and Pickens making plays was real.

Barham standing up Derrick Henry was very real.

A Dallas offense capable of moving the football against Baltimore was real.

And a team that erased an 11-point deficit and put itself two yards from taking the lead late in the fourth quarter deserves credit for doing it.

But something else was real too.

The penalties.

The turnover.

The missed opportunities.

The questionable decisions.

The inability to finish drives.

The situational football.

Those aren't footnotes to an otherwise encouraging afternoon.

They're why Dallas is 1–2 instead of 2–1.

Washington showed us what this team can look like when things begin coming together.

Baltimore showed us something more useful.

The Cowboys may actually be getting better.

They just aren't yet good enough to survive themselves.

And until that changes, progress is going to keep looking a lot like what happened in Rio:

Good enough to make you believe.

Flawed enough to make you regret it.