It feels like every week of the Dallas Cowboys season has brought with it a new and unexpected challenge. Such is life in 2020.
Early on the Cowboys dealt with their own ineptitude which is what made things rather difficult. Since the game against the New York Giants, their last win to date, life has continually been made more difficult them from an injury standpoint. Dallas is missing a number of important players which has proven to be even more difficult than any of us could have possibly imagined.
Ask your fellow Cowboys fan how things are going and you’re likely going to get a somber smirk paired with silence. The team has been more than disappointing, they have been underwhelming and at times even boring. It is an unfortunate combination of factors for a season that many of us thought held so much promise.
Needless to say there is no shortage of pessimism surrounding America’s Team at the moment. Interestingly enough Cowboys fans are actually feeling mildly better following the team’s latest loss. Seriously!
Cowboys fans are surprisingly feeling more optimistic after last week’s performance in Philadelphia
We track the confidence level of Cowboys fans every week using SB Nation’s Reacts tool and following the Week 7 loss in Philadelphia it reached its lowest point of the season - 2%. When you’re at the bottom there is generally nowhere to go but up, but interestingly that did indeed happen for a Cowboys team that failed to score a touchdown for the second straight week. We are all the way up to 12%, baby!
Again it should be noted that when you are at the absolute bottom the law of averages suggests that there is only one direction to go. Cowboys fans have in fact increased in confidence by 10 percentage points, but does that really even have anything to do with this particular season?
It is possible that you, like many Cowboys fans, have simply accepted the reality that 2020 has led us towards. For those that have accepted the hand that Dallas has been dealt the focus has seemingly shifted towards the 2021 NFL Draft where, thanks to the continued losses that the Cowboys are taking, the team is currently projected to have a top five pick. Now that is something worth being mildly excited about!
Logic would suggest that this is certainly the case as there aren’t many people on the planet that think a Cowboys team who has actually gone two straight games without scoring a touchdown would have much of a chance against the NFL’s only undefeated team in the Pittsburgh Steelers. Confidence seems to be geared towards 2021, although it is fair if you were mildly encouraged by the team’s defensive performance in Philadelphia as they finally showed up and got something legitimate out of Trevon Diggs.
Perhaps Cowboys fans are simply at a point of hysteria and are just down for the ride at this point, however up and down it may be. It will be interesting to see how things line up after the Steelers game and the bye week as we inch closer and closer to Thanksgiving Day.