Good, Bad, Ugly: Cowboys offense no-shows, tackling disappears in 31-10 flop

Yeesh. The weather was expected to be rainy in western New York on Sunday, but it was the previously 10-3 Cowboys who were all wet in this Week 15 meeting that proved to be more beatdown than showdown.

The Bills came out fast and physical from the opening kickoff, while the Cowboys mostly looked like they just wanted to get inside out of the rain. The end result was a 31-10 loss that will resurrect all those concerns about Dallas not being able to run with winning teams on the road. Given that the Cowboys’ postseason slate looks to be exactly that situation every single week they’re in it, alarm bells are likely sounding at The Star.

While nothing went right for the team on the field, there was a bit of good news delivered by the outcomes of several early games. That was it, though, for the Cowboys’ day, as they got completely buffaloed by the Bills in what fans can only hope turns out to be an isolated late-season stumble.

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Bad: Tackling anyone, especially James Cook

The Cowboys defense had not allowed a 100-yard rusher all season, but they gave up 104 to Cook in the first half alone… and then let him go for 75 more after the break. (His 42 receiving yards and two total touchdowns didn’t help matters.)

Many of Cook’s yards came after contact as Dallas defenders had all kinds of problems wrapping up the 5-foot-11-inch 190-pounder. It wasn’t just Cook, though: the Bills offense had several plays where second effort and merely playing all the way to the whistle resulted in bonus yardage.

The absence of defensive tackle Johnathan Hankins was a factor, but every layer of Dan Quinn’s unit seemed thoroughly uninterested in tackling on Sunday. They got punched in the mouth on Buffalo’s opening drive and outmuscled the rest of the afternoon.

Ugly: Big penalties give Bills multiple second chances

The most-penalized team in the league was relatively well-behaved on Sunday, drawing just five yellow flags for 48 yards in the wrong direction. But a few of those infractions were especially costly; each of the Bills’ three touchdown drives before intermission included a big-yardage Cowboys gaffe as a contributing factor.

DeMarcus Lawrence’s roughing the passer penalty on the first Buffalo drive came on a third-down stop in the red zone. The next possession saw a roughing the punter call against Sam Williams give the ball right back to Josh Allen. On the Bills’ third drive, an unnecessary roughness flag thrown on Jayron Kearse moved the sticks 15 more yards and kept the Buffalo offense churning.

Three flags = 18 points.

Call it sloppy, call it undisciplined, call it uninspired from the get-go, but the Cowboys shot themselves in the foot numerous times in the Week 15 loss, doing a good chunk of the Bills’ job for them.

Bad: Injuries coming in bunches

Zack Martin, Micah Parsons, Donovan Wilson, Damone Clark, CeeDee Lamb. If you were looking for your favorite Cowboys player on Sunday, there’s a fair chance he was slow picking himself up off the Highmark Stadium turf.

Parsons, Wilson, Clark, and Lamb were all able to re-enter the game, giving just momentary scares. (And speaking of scares, Dak Prescott took a silly number of hits in this one; Dallas is fortunate he didn’t take any serious hits.) But the status of Martin’s quad- after it forced him to sit out the majority of this loss- will be a monumental storyline in Dallas this week.

Ugly: Total no-show from Cowboys offense

Pick a stat or metric to use. Fewer than 200 total yards. Five-for-13 on third downs. Only one drive of more than a dozen plays. A longest play of just 20 yards. A single touchdown, scored long after the game was had been decided.

The best offense in football (by many standards) must have stayed behind in Dallas, because Prescott & Co. could do nothing on Sunday in Buffalo. Prescott missed open receivers, his targets dropped balls, his offensive line couldn’t keep Bills defenders away from him.

After scoring 33 or more points in each of the five previous contests, the Cowboys barely got to double digits versus Buffalo and could do no better than matching their season low, when they scored just 10 in that early-October disaster by the Bay.

Good: Postseason berth clinched

The only good thing that happened for the Cowboys in Buffalo took place before they even kicked off to start the game. With early-afternoon losses by Green Bay and Atlanta, coupled with a Detroit win, Dallas’s ticket to the playoffs was officially punched.

They sure didn’t look like a playoff team for the three hours that followed, but time will tell if their loss to Buffalo was just a bad day or a bad omen for facing good teams on the road in the tournament.

Story originally appeared on Cowboys Wire