Yes, it’s just one preseason game. Yes, most of the players on the field against the Seahawks on Sunday won’t make the 53-man roster. Yes, individual preseason stats mean next to nothing when the regular season rolls around. But you can’t just ignore what happens in these preseason games either.
One interesting stat that popped after the game (per Bobby Belt) was the fact that the Cowboys had 19 missed tackles in last year’s preseason opener. On Sunday, Next Gen Stats charted the Cowboys with zero
missed tackles.
Will that carry over into the regular season? Who knows. But is it indicative of an improved defensive performance? Probably.
The same applies to defensive passer rating, which is a good proxy for the performance of the pass defense. On Sunday, the Cowboys allowed a defensive passer rating of just 88.8. That’s almost 12 points lower than what they allowed in last year’s preseason opener, but more importantly, it’s lower than what the team allowed in all but one of its regular-season games last year.
The Cowboys allowed a 109.6 defensive passer rating in 2025, the worst mark in the league. Sunday’s 88.8 rating is almost 21 points lower than last year’s average and would have ranked the Cowboys 13th in the league last season.
And the difference wasn’t limited to one player. Here’s what the Seahawks passing game looked like by pass direction and distance:
The Seahawks weren’t exactly attacking the Cowboys vertically. Drew Lock and Jalen Milroe didn’t test the Cowboys secondary deep very often, and when they did, they weren’t particularly successful.
That obviously comes with a massive caveat: we’re dealing with a very small sample size here, and neither Seattle nor Dallas played most of their established starters. Still, the lack of explosive passing plays shows up in the individual defensive passer ratings as well.
Every Cowboys cornerback who played Sunday finished with a lower DPR than the 114.8 average posted by the Cowboys’ cornerbacks in 2025.
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 0px 6px !important; }| 2026 Player | Targets | CMP | Yards | DPR |
| Trikweze Bridges | 4 | 2 | 15 | 99.0 |
| Derion Kendrick | 3 | 2 | 10 | 71.5 |
| Shavon Revel | 1 | 1 | 3 | 79.2 |
| Josh Butler | 1 | 1 | 4 | 83.3 |
| Ameer Speed | 1 | 1 | 3 | 79.2 |
| Caelen Carson | 1 | 0 | 0 | 39.6 |
| Reddy Steward | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2025 Cowboys CB average | 114.8 | |||
The highest individual DPR among the Cowboys’ cornerbacks was 99.0, still comfortably below last year’s 114.8 average. And it wasn’t just the cornerbacks.
Where last year’s Cowboys safeties averaged a 134.6 DPR, the five safeties who played against Seattle were targeted just once — an incompletion — producing a combined DPR of 39.6.
The linebackers also came in well below last year’s unit average of 118.5.
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 0px 6px !important; }| 2026 Player | Targets | CMP | Yards | DPR |
| Curtis Robinson | 4 | 4 | 13 | 80.2 |
| Langston Patterson | 2 | 1 | 10 | 64.6 |
| Shemar James | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Justin Barron | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2025 Cowboys LB Average | 118.5 | |||
So there you have it: at least for one preseason game, the new second- and third-team secondary looked nothing like last year’s secondary. That’s already something, even if it’s just one preseason game. Too early to call it a trend, though.
This week’s opponent, the Cardinals, posted a 130.6 passer rating in their first preseason game and may pose a very different challenge for the Cowboys defense. So next week’s results might look very different, or they might give us another data point suggesting that what we are seeing is real.
