The season from hell at Jerry World just got a bit worse. The Dallas Cowboys got walloped by the lowly Washington Football Team on Sunday by the tune of 25–3, but even that scoreline doesn't do justice to the figurative and literal beatdown suffered by Dallas. With a chance to, somehow, leap into first place in the NFC East, the Dak Prescott-less Cowboys offense was awful for the second straight week, and now they might be down to their third-string quarterback for the foreseeable future.
Things started getting loopy early, as Washington recorded a safety off an Andy Dalton fumble halfway through the first quarter:
And that wasn't even the worst part of Dalton's day. In the third quarter, Dalton scrambled out of the end zone on a third-and-long, only to get speared in the head by Washington's Jon Bostic:
Bostic was ejected for the hit, but the damage was done. Dalton couldn't continue, so seventh-round pick Ben DiNucci came in at QB and did what most seventh-round pick QBs do: not much of anything. The former James Madison quarterback finished with just 39 yards on 2-of-3 passing, which, unsurprisingly, didn't help Dallas come back from a 19-point fourth quarter deficit.
Credit to Washington, which played its best game of the year against the under-manned Cowboys. Kyle Allen was steady enough (15-for-25, 194 yards and two scores), while Antonio Gibson racked up 128 rushing yards and a score on the league's worst scoring defense. On the other side, Cole Holcomb picked Dalton off before he was knocked out of the game, and the entire WASTEAM defense held the Cowboys to just 141 total yards.
If Dalton misses any significant time, the Cowboys will be in even deeper shit than they currently are, even if Dalton hadn't been all that great since taking over after Prescott's injury. The only good bit of news for Dallas is that the NFC East is such a disaster this season that even at 2-6, they are still just a tie behind the Eagles for first place. Of course, with Sunday's win, Washington is in the same exact situation, so who even knows? Someone's got to make it to the playoffs from the worst division in football, after all.
