Cowboys seek redemption against struggling Cardinals. Can Dallas exploit Arizona's weaknesses and turn their season around, or will the questions persist?
Turning their attention away from their 44-24 Week 8 loss to the Denver Broncos and towards, the Dallas Cowboys start focusing on what’s quickly becoming a must-win game in Week 9 against the Arizona Cardinals. Luckily for the Cowboys, the Cardinals have just as many questions as they do.
Sitting at 2-5 coming off a bye week, Arizona is a team that has consistently come up just short this year. After starting 2-0, they’ve lost five straight games by a combined 13 points with the widest margin being four points in Week 6 when they lost 31-27 to a very good Indianapolis Colts team, and in Week 7 when they couldn’t pull off the upset against the Green Bay Packers in a 27-23 contest.
Those two teams currently have a combined 12-2-1 record, showing that, even though Arizona’s record isn’t where they wanted it to be, they’re not as much of a pushover as their record might show. Of note, those two games were started by Jacoby Brissett at quarterback, although Kyler Murray is expected to return this week.
Looking at this from Dallas’ perspective, this game presents the opportunity to remedy a lot of the negative trends we’ve seen in the first half of the season. If they’re going to fix them at all this season, it needs to be now or never.
The Cardinals’ offense is No. 20 in the league in rushing yards per game at 110.4, although quite a bit of that has come from Kyler Murray. After losing James Connor and subsequently Trey Benson to the IR, the team has rotated Emari Demercado, Bam Knight, and Michael Carter at the running back position to little avail.
For a Cowboys defense that is giving up 146 yards per game on the ground, “good” for No. 29 in the league, a struggling and inconsistent running backs group is a shot to build momentum going into the bye week. The same can be said for the secondary.
Like their running game, the Cardinals' pass game is below average in yards per game, sitting at No. 23 with 199.9 yards. The Dallas defense, of course, is close to the bottom of the barrel, surrendering 258.6 yards through the air per game, which is No. 31 in the NFL.
We’ll dive more into it as the week goes on, but the Cowboys offense will be fine. They were due for a bad week like they had against the Broncos, and they’ll bounce back.
But, like the season as the whole, this game will come down to the defense and their ability to answer one simple question: if not now, then when?