The Dallas Cowboys will play on both Thanksgiving and Christmas this season in the coming months, but through six games, the only thing fans know for sure about this team is they have a defense more suited for the upcoming holiday of Halloween – one sure to provide scares, spooks, and frights to followers of America’s Team. The scariest thing of all is the type of season on offense this defense is already on the verge of totally ruining, with Dak Prescott returning to MVP-level performance immediately
in Brian Schottenheimer’s offense.
Schottenheimer’s scheme has proven to be a natural fit for veterans, recent draft picks, free agent acquisitions like Javonte Williams, trade pieces like George Pickens, and most of all, Prescott. As for the defense? They are much more of Frankenstein’s monster going through the same type of personnel and scheme shifts simultaneously under the coordination of Matt Eberflus.
The third defensive coordinator in Dallas in three seasons, Eberflus was dealt a tough hand in a lot of ways, not just the departure of Micah Parsons at the 11th hour before week one in Philadelphia. There is a reason this hasn’t excused Eberflus’ coaching with the currently 2-3-1 Cowboys in any way though.
While players like Kenneth Murray and Donovan Wilson have also caught their share of criticism, the entire operation on defense isn’t aligning itself with competing in, or much less winning, football games. The Cowboys only wins are against the Giants in overtime when they still allowed 37 points, and a Jets team that has proven to make anyone look good against them this year as the last winless side so far in 2025. The Cowboys were one defensive stop away from having a more hallmark win against the Packers, but that 40-40 tie instead became their first game in well over a decade where scoring 40 points did not result in a win.
A full autopsy is needed to understand how and why this defense is failing so much, the type of which seems destined to wait until after the season. The Cowboys have already proven time and time again in recent history they aren’t afraid of philosophy changes on defense, but doing so with a coaching change midseason is not their thing. A defense this bad has little hope to improve now no matter what is done at this point in the year. The returns of players like Caelen Carson, rookie Shavon Revel, DeMarvion Overshown, and Malik Hooker all from injury may help a little, but the sad truth is that it’s still the offense with more to look forward to in this regard. An offense already putting up scoreboard-breaking numbers will likely welcome back Tyler Booker at right guard and CeeDee Lamb at wide receiver this week versus the Commanders.
The thought of Dallas getting even better on offense by getting healthier is a scary one for opponents, but the thought of the defense still being putrid enough for it not to matter in the win column is even scarier for Cowboys fans.
The Cowboys are 1-1-1 in their last three games despite Prescott throwing 10 touchdowns, no interceptions, and completing 72% of his passes.
In what already feels like a season on life support thanks to two clunkers at the Bears and Panthers in six weeks, the talks about this team being more towards the longer-term future under Schottenheimer are coming way faster than anyone could have hoped for. While it’s important to understand the context of any comments made by the front office or coaching staff about the future right now, the early returns are as harrowing as actually watching the defense fail to tackle or cover on game days.
For the moment, the Cowboys setback loss at the Panthers was matched by an Eagles loss on Thursday night at the Giants, followed up with a Commanders loss at home to the Bears. With a home win on Sunday against the Commanders, the Cowboys can match last year’s NFC runner up in the win column and not rule out any talks of still fighting for a playoff spot. Again, this is important context for anything coming out of The Star seemingly supporting Matt Eberflus, who still has a job to do trying to make even the marginal gains on defense that would go a long way in keeping these playoff hopes alive given the potency of the Cowboys own offense.
In a world where Baker Mayfield and the Bucs are getting touted as the current #1 team in the NFC, the Cowboys shouldn’t rule out still trying to get something, anything at all, out of this season with Prescott’s current level of play.
With that context in mind, the Cowboys appear dug in at a dangerous level on the idea of letting Eberflus work his way through these defensive issues. The franchise faced such harsh criticism when hiring Schottenheimer as head coach under the similar guise of familiarity and having an underdog story, and have already seen Schottenheimer make them look much better than given credit for by overcoming this circumstance. It seems like the Cowboys doing the opposite for another familiar coach in Eberflus would currently be an admittance of failure they are not even close to entertaining.
The drastic difference between the team’s offense and defense has created a disparity even wider than when Mike McCarthy’s offense was successful in year one but his defense under Mike Nolan was not. Even still, the Cowboys undermining their own head coach isn’t the worst development going on with this bipolar 2025 squad.
The worst part comes when looking under the hood at how the personnel on this defense was put together.
The Cowboys stuck their neck out in uncharacteristic ways this offseason to overhaul the defense. For the first time in a long time, they used all avenues of player acquisition to show a real seriousness towards improvement. Dallas made trades for Murray and Kenny Clark, they signed Jack Sanborn, Dante Fowler and Solomon Thomas, and surprisingly added to the depth chart at defensive end and cornerback instead of wide receiver or running back through the first three rounds of the draft with Donovan Ezeiruaku and Revel.
If the Cowboys end up associating their defensive failures with this break in the pattern to get talent in multiple ways, it could lead to even worse results. Dallas will have every reason to go back to their ways of only using the draft as their main form of roster building, where defensive hits in recent years are few and far between. They will scrape the bottom of the barrel in free agency and thrust those players into much larger roles than they’re capable of. The Cowboys need to trust that parts of their process in constructing this defense were good, but the big picture of playing defense the way Eberflus has is the root source of the issue.
Eberflus even has his fingerprints all over the acquisitions of both Murray and Sanborn. Murray being a former first-round pick at linebacker, the position Eberflus coached well enough previously with the Cowboys to become a defensive coordinator for the Colts, made him an easy target for a team infatuated with former first-round picks all over the roster. Sanborn played directly for Eberflus when he was head coach with the Bears. Sanborn did not play against the Panthers, but when both linebackers have been healthy, they almost never come off the field no matter how lost they look in coverage or how many missed tackles they have against the run. The Cowboys culture of competitiveness and having a standard under Schottenheimer seems to not apply especially to the second level of their defense at the moment.
If another defensive coordinator was able to bring in similar talent, the process could again be sound, but trusting Eberflus to hand pick Murray and Sanborn to play the types of drop zones that Dallas doesn’t have the personnel for anywhere else on the defense is costing them dearly. The fourth-down conversion that led to the Panthers’ game-winning field goal last week is a play that will haunt this team, with DaRon Bland playing so far off of Hunter Renfrow, and Murray being asked to cover an impossible amount of ground to drop underneath the throwing lane.
Speaking of Bland and his running mate Trevon Diggs, both of which have already missed time again this season, neither cornerback has even shown a strong ability to play in zone coverages. To that same tune, any coverage responsibilities at all have always been below average for Donovan Wilson, but Diggs, Bland, and Wilson are hardly ever put in positions to play to their strengths with Eberflus’ current play-calling.
Remember the amount of doubt around this fanbase at the time of Schottenheimer’s hiring that he would have a big enough influence to make the offense look any different from that of Kellen Moore’s or Mike McCarthy’s? The offense under Schottenheimer has squashed this doubt emphatically, but the defense has taken an equal amount of steps backwards. The Cowboys don’t change the pre-snap looks they give opposing offenses, they don’t mix up coverages, they no longer bring pressures to force the ball out of a quarterback’s hands like they did in week one, and they aren’t gap sound by any stretch of the imagination against the run. Coach Schottenheimer is proving that coaching matters, and he’s not alone in earning praise as a new coach that’s brought a lot of positive energy to the way Dallas looks prepared on game days – but only on offense. Klayton Adams and Conor Riley have been fantastic additions for the Cowboys to maximize their investment on the offensive line. The energy around Eberflus’ defense has been completely opposite.
The Cowboys haven’t made many financial commitments to any one defensive player or position group to know where the strength of their defense lies, but right now the only commitment they seem to have is that Eberflus will be the coach to get it right when they do. If they admit trading Parsons away was a mistake in that the pass rush has suffered too much and look to add in this department, Eberflus’ scheme is not known for bringing pressure. If they reshuffle once again at linebacker, the position they should be able to trust Eberflus the most with, he’ll first have to answer for the team-sinking play of both Murray and Sanborn. If they accept that having Diggs and Bland at cornerback is not enough to carry that position group, they’ll be doing so without even seeing their two best man coverage defenders play in man under Eberflus. Hashing this out for the safety group feels silly given how little the Cowboys have always valued safeties, but again Eberflus had nothing on previous film from a player like Wilson to justify the amount of deep coverage he’s been asked to play the first six games of this season. Players need to be put in the best position to succeed, and at the same time the Cowboys offense has figured this out in an exponentially better way than any recent season, the defense is earning a failing grade in this department and several others under Eberflus.
The Cowboys will also need new players for this defense to have a chance under whoever may be the fourth coordinator in four years should Eberflus truly be one and done. The path towards fixing both sides of the equation cannot start anywhere else but fully realizing the level of failure Eberflus’ play-calling and scheme have been, something the Cowboys have frighteningly been unwilling to do at the moment.
One of their former defensive coordinators, Dan Quinn, will be in the building as the opposing head coach this week, yet it’s not his defense that just allowed 381 yards and 5.4 yards a carry to the Bears that worries the Cowboys the most. It should be their own defense having no answers for Jayden Daniels and a Commanders offense getting healthier at just the right time to face an Eberflus defense that’s been the best medicine for an ailing offense any team could dream for this season.
The Cowboys have a chance to keep the entire football side of their operation moving in a healthy and positive direction, but everything about Matt Eberflus’ defense is weighing this progress down at the moment.
