ARLINGTON — The trade before the season for Kenny Clark caused controversy, anger and, maybe, a little understanding.
The trades at the deadline for Quinnen Williams and Logan Wilson were met with surprise and hope that the season’s downward pace would end.
After the Cowboys’ 34-26 loss to the Vikings on Sunday night, it seems the moves the Cowboys made to improve this defense are a temporary fix.
Over the last two weeks, in the games the Cowboys needed to keep their playoff hopes alive, as faint as they were, the defense failed.
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While coach Brian Schottenheimer was praising the work of Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores, you wonder if anyone was doing the same for Matt Eberflus.
His defense has allowed 78 points in the last two losses and 14 scoring drives in 23 possessions, with just one takeaway.
On Sunday night, rookie quarterback J.J. McCarthy, in just his eighth NFL start, threw a pair of touchdown passes. He was sacked nine times coming into the Cowboys’ game.
Clark said in the lead-up to the game that McCarthy was hard to bring down. It was met with skepticism at midweek, but after Sunday night’s clash, he was right. McCarthy wasn’t sacked once.
“He’s athletic,” Schottenheimer said. “I thought he stepped up a couple of times and made some nice plays. But strong lower body guy, that’s real. I think he’s a hell of a competitor, he made the plays and I think that’s a big thing for us tonight, we didn’t make the critical plays when we needed to. When you look back on this game I feel like we let one slip away because there were some good moments and, unfortunately, we did it at an inopportune time.”
McCarthy completed 15 of 24 passes for 250 yards with a funky interception by Williams off a tipped pass. McCarthy’s quarterback rating was 108.0 and his swagger was never higher.
He pulled a fake handoff and danced into the end zone untouched, as linebacker Marist Liufau bit on the action for a touchdown that tied the score 14-14.
In what seemed to be another indictment of how poorly this defense played, fullback C.J. Ham, who had just two carries in 2024, had his first of the 2025 season and scored on a 1-yard run.
That third-quarter score gave the Vikings the lead, 24-23, that they would never relinquish.
What made the Ham touchdown run look so bad was linebacker Kenneth Murray’s reaction on the play. He stood in the middle of the play looking for something to happen. He picked the wrong lane to charge as Ham went through the interior of the line untouched on the other side of Murray.
On Sunday night, the Cowboys decided to move Murray to a backup role to make sure Wilson received the majority of the snaps as a starter.
It was something the Cowboys needed to do sooner, but they harped Wilson required more time to get acclimated to the defensive scheme.
In some changes to the defense, the Cowboys had DeMarvion Overshown as the lone linebacker on the field at times. There was no Trevon Diggs on the field, still sitting on injured reserve. Team owner Jerry Jones mentioned after the game that the best cornerback on the team is still trying to get healthy.
Overall, this defense just didn’t do enough to help an offense that went 2-for-12 on third downs and settled for four field goals.
And while the Cowboys’ defense did slow the Vikings to go 2-for-9 on third downs, Schottenheimer said the fourth-down conversions hurt.
The Vikings went 3-for-3 on fourth downs, a situation where the Cowboys had to make a stop to help its struggling offense.
“At the end of the day, when you play a team like this, you got to be really on top of your situational stuff and we weren’t,” Schottenheimer said.
This loss Sunday and the previous one to the Lions raised more questions about the future of this defense. Is Eberflus the man for this job with his zone-heavy scheme? In Eberflus’ defense, it seemed the Cowboys played more man-to-man with corners DaRon Bland and Shavon Revel.
But the lack of a pass rush, McCarthy was hit just once according to the box score, was alarming. At the end of the evening, Schottenheimer kept talking about how Flores was tricking his quarterback, Dak Prescott, and himself with blitzes and disguises of coverages. And then there was this, “Brian Flores was better than me today.”
You wondered if anyone said that about Eberflus.
Over the next three weeks, this Cowboys defense, which traded Micah Parsons for Clark and added Williams and Wilson — giving away Mazi Smith who has been inactive for four games with the Jets and a first-round pick — will need to showcase that it’s getting better.
The last two games haven’t done that, raising questions about the future.
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