Caleb Williams had ‘his best game’ vs. Steelers, Can the Cowboys make the playoffs? | The Herd

Caleb Williams had ‘his best game’ vs. Steelers, Can the Cowboys make the playoffs? | The Herd

Uh, I said it last week, and I’ve been a huge critic of the Cowboys. They’re not as far off as you think since they’ve made these trades. OK. A lot of us may owe an apology to Gerald Wayne Jones Junior, because Kenny Clarke and Quinnin Williams deals, now suddenly you can’t run on the Cowboys. The Micah Parsons trade. Well, it didn’t have much of an effect. They’re still top 3 in quarterback rushes. The George Pickens move, I mean, that, that’s one of the heists. Poor Steelers can’t throw the ball down the field. George Pickens, 3rd in the NFL in touchdowns. DeMarvi and Overshone, that dude was great at Texas with the longhorns. He is healthy. He is super athletic. 21st-round picks. They’re gonna get an edge to replace Micah, probably a corner. I don’t know. The offense works, man. Number 1 in the league in total offense, #1 in passing, number 4 in scoring. It works. And because of Pickens and CD Lamb, you can’t cheat on the run game. So, the Cowboys are running the ball now better than they have since Zeke in 2019. Now, the O-line is hot and cold. Better run blocking than pass blocking. But statistically, I know, I know they’re only 55 and 1. I know, I know they’re playing Kansas City. And it may not turn out well, but I would rather be Dallas today and have the offense figured out than be the Steelers for the 5th year in a row, paying a fortune for a defense that can’t stop anybody. You can say what you want about Dallas. 2 1st-round picks. Overshone’s healthy. George Pickens heist, a real run game for the 1st time in forever. And say this for Jerry. Or, or Gerald Wayne Jones Senior. He has always been 100% committed to DC. He has said he’s the best leader I’ve ever had. And yesterday, that unflappable leadership trailing 21-0, throwing, you know, he can throw a RedZone pick, doesn’t matter. It’s Dak. It’s just noise. A lot of that win was Dak, and Jerry said, Dak was indispensable. Micah was great, but he was tradable. And guess what? The Cowboys are still getting a pass rush. The Cowboys’ defense right now is better than it was last year and With Micah, it is. You can’t run on him now with Kenny Clarke and Quinnin Williams. Yeah, I have questions about Shoddy. I, I didn’t think it was the strongest hire. I thought they should have gone heavy into Mike Vrabel or the year before into Jim Harbaugh or Sean Payton, and they didn’t, and Jerry doesn’t necessarily want to pay coaches big money, but I’ll say this for Shoddy. When teams play hard and don’t quit, it’s something. I mean, they, they, I thought they were buried. I mean, it’s 21-0. I’m like, oh, come on, I wanted a good game. It’s the late window. Give me a game. I don’t wanna have to watch Jacksonville and Arizona. Give me a game. And it was. And it’s Dak, and it’s leadership, and it’s no quit, and it’s overshonen. I don’t know. Philly’s been tempting fate for weeks and nobody can quite beat them, and then the Cowboys do. To score 24 unanswered points against a really, really good defense. Credit to everybody, even Matt Eberflus. Everybody gets credit for this one. but more than anything, it is Dak. A lot of noise, unflappable. Jerry’s always been committed to him. We all owe him an apology. You know, it’s funny you start looking at these first-round deals and you’re like, oh, they’re, they’re losing Micah. They couldn’t defend the run when they had Micah. Now you can’t run on him. So, who made the good deal? Who made the bad deal? I said during the Micah deal, good for Green Bay, not terrible for Dallas. Dallas will be fine. They just got to get healthy. They gotta get some draft picks. I’ll say this, sometimes you have unintended consequences or unintended benefits of a trade, right? I don’t think they thought when George Pickens arrived, it would help the run game so much. But you got Pickens on one side, CD on the other. You can’t just do single coverage. You, you gotta do some bracketing. You gotta play honest. You can’t have your safeties two up. So, the reality is now the run game’s working, the O-line’s getting better. Two elite receivers, Dak’s on fire, 2 first-round picks. Don’t need a quarterback, so could turn 2 first-round picks into 5 total picks. The great thing about the NFL, it’s the League of Hope. You can be absolutely awful one year, New England, and be a number one seed the following year, potentially New England. Can’t do that in baseball. You can’t do that in the NBA. It takes time and acquisitions. That is what is great. If you have a reasonable quarterback, and Dak is more than reasonable, look at Dallas from hopeless to hopeful. This morning All right. Used to be a saying, how about them cowboys? How about the Bears, 1st place. Now, Chicago was missing 6 defensive starters. So, let’s just start with that. Their entire linebacking corps was out. So, suddenly you go into this game with Pittsburgh thinking, Oh, we can’t be boring. We’ve got to actually, we gotta move the ball down the field. And Caleb Williams, in my opinion, played his best game as a pro. Yeah, he had a bad strip sack for a touchdown. Yeah, he misses open receivers. Yep, 4th straight game under 60% completions. But Ben and Caleb is a marriage and both are helping each other out. Ben has provided creative play design and creative play calling, and he’s created some structure. And focused on the run game. And Caleb is given Ben Johnson the horsepower that Jared Goff in Detroit could have only dreamed of. It is a marriage, not of convenience. It works. It’s never gonna be perfect. Caleb gives you all this horsepower, but he does miss some throws. It’s just, you know, it’s just part of his game. And I, I said this, I’ll always take the upside for some struggles and accuracy. And Ben and Caleb are both incredibly gifted. Right now, they’re the #1 big play offense in the NFL. This is Chicago. That’s something Green Bay does, or McVeigh does, or Shanahan does, or Buffalo and Josh Allen does. No, it’s Chicago. And here’s the thing about Caleb. If he’s your quarterback, there’s 2 or 3 guarantees. Big arm, big mobility, playmaker, loves the big play. And Ben Johnson is providing the structure and the running game to allow that. Much easier to throw downfield on 2nd and 4. When you don’t have negative plays. That’s the one thing about Caleb. There’s 2 or 3 things we all know about him. But I have said this for years about Caleb. He doesn’t get hurt and he doesn’t throw picks. If you provide him with a decent structure to play within and a foundational running game, then those big plays are easier. It sucks the linebackers in, it gives him more space. He’s gonna make plays with his feet, and he’s got a huge arm. But he just needs structure. He needs a run game. And he’s obviously coachable because he’s completely eliminated the negative plays. 11 games, he’s been sacked 11 times. Now just think about that. That’s not because pass rushers died. It’s not just because they improved the offensive line. If you’re sacked 68 times and it’s down to 11, you are coachable, and a lot of great athletes in all sports aren’t, and Caleb is. So this marriage works. I don’t think it’s a perfect fit. They’re, they’re facing a very angry Philadelphia team next. That’s not a place I’d want to be. But Ben and Caleb addressed the number one issue. What did Ben say? No negative plays. We can’t have these 2nd and 22s, 3rd and 19s. We can’t do that where everybody knows what we’re doing. So, they’re doing play action, they’re doing under center. It really works. And here’s with Caleb, you don’t get the picks. It’s very rare in the history of the NFL that you get all this upside, and you don’t get a lot of downside. I mean, Marino threw picks, Elway threw picks, Namath threw picks, Peyton threw picks, Luck picks, Cam picks, uh, Josh Allen picks. When you get the massive upside, there’s usually a downside. He doesn’t throw them. So, it’s, it’s working. They’re winning. It’s a little uneven. It’s not always a perfect fit. But when you’re missing your entire linebacking crew. And you’re going up against the team in Pittsburgh, don’t forget, hammered the Patriots. The red hot Patriots hammered the Colts, who went toe to toe with Mahomes and Andy Reid. So, wins or wins.

The Chicago Bears beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-28 despite missing several starters on Defense. Colin Cowherd asks if the Bears are contenders, and he discusses the Dallas Cowboys beating the Philadelphia Eagles 24-21.

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Caleb Williams had ‘his best game’ vs. Steelers, Can the Cowboys make the playoffs? | The Herd
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