It's hard to have a worse opening week in the NFL than the Dallas Cowboys had in Week 1. Beyond falling well short against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a 19-3 drubbing, the team also lost their quarterback Dak Prescott to injury before the end of the contest.
Instead of hanging their heads, Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy wants his squad to use the injury woes as a rallying cry for the rest of the season, via ESPN:
“Our theme this year is resilience,” McCarthy said Monday. “We knew we were going to have challenges. You can't get to where you want to go without them. We got a bunch in Week 1. We're just charging forward.”
If the team was looking for adversity to fuel them throughout the season, they certainly got their money's worth in Week 1 given how dour their operation looked even beyond the Dak Prescott injury.
They finished the game with a 50 percent completion rate for a total of just 173 passing yards with no touchdowns. All they could muster was a first quarter field goal and were completely shut out the rest of the way. And that's with Dak Prescott throwing most of the passes before backup Cooper Rush took over.
The good news is that Prescott's diagnosis sounds better than expected, with an initial timetable listing an eight-week recovery period being reduced in half should his progress go smoothly. In the meantime, the Cowboys will likely need as much resilience as Mike McCarthy can dig up from his team as they await the return of their signal caller.