Several Cowboys players elevated their stock throughout Sunday’s win.
The Dallas Cowboys were victorious on Sunday for the first time since the San Diego Padres were still alive in the MLB playoffs against the eventual World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers.
Sunday’s win was also the first one for Dallas since before the NBA season began or since our clocks fell back (except for you folks in Arizona). Consider that the last time the Cowboys won a game the New York Jets head coach was still Robert Saleh.
Needless to say, we sort of forgot what to do with our hands around here! Watching the Cowboys win is apparently something that requires every ounce of stress and passion in a game’s final moments as exemplified by the crazy Rico Dowdle fumble in Pittsburgh (the last win before Sunday) and whatever you want to call the final minutes of game clock against the Washington Commanders.
Here is our stock report following all of it. All good vibes this week because if you are winning for the first time in forever you keep the lights on and the music turned up.
Stock Up: KaVontae Turpin
I’ll be the first to admit that I was a little slow to buy all the way in to KaVontae Turpin as a potential weapon on offense. Obviously, I have come around. But for the most part I don’t know of a single person who was ever slow, certainly not Turpin himself, on the idea of him impacting things on special teams.
Clearly what happened on Sunday was incredible, but did you know that this was his first kickoff returned for a touchdown?! Seriously!
TURPIN!!!!!!
(via @dallascowboys) pic.twitter.com/WxSNRBMBhE
— Blogging The Boys (@BloggingTheBoys) November 24, 2024
Consider that Turpin currently has 21 total kickoff returns for an average of 36.3 on each one of them. Now consider that the greatest kickoff return season that Pro Football Hall of Famer Devin Hester ever had saw him average 35.6 yards per kickoff return off of 33 total.
We are in some pretty rare space here.
Stock Up: Josh Butler
When it was reported that Trevon Diggs would not be playing in this game a majority of the fan base lamented on how we would not be seeing him line up with DaRon Bland yet again.
Josh Butler, though!
Teams talk about next man up all the time. For the Cowboys yesterday, the evidence was Josh Butler’s performance. pic.twitter.com/jJFYq0Roeh
— Joseph Hoyt (@JoeJHoyt) November 25, 2024
Look, nobody is saying that Josh Butler is Trevon Diggs. But like with Achilles’ cousin in the movie Troy, he looked and moved just like him! Butler was phenomenal on Sunday and provided the type of play from a piece that you want to see involved in the future, especially one that is going to involve some hard decisions.
Stock Up: Luke Schoonmaker
Are we seeing a corner turned here? I don’t want to overly freak out, but Luke Schoonmaker has been playing wonderfully over the last two games.
Maybe things are really a matter of opportunity. Schoonmaker had 26 total targets through his first 26 games and has 14 over the last two. Obviously not having a ton of opportunities early on for a second-round pick was part of the issue surrounding the selection, but it seems clear that there is something to work with regarding the player himself.
Scoonmaker is riding a two-game streak now of recording at least 55 yards. Jake Ferguson did this last year and Dalton Schultz did it a few times before him. You will not be shocked to learn that Jason Witten did it a million times.
Ultimately the point is that Schoonmaker is proving to be a reliable pass-catching weapon. That is a wonderful development.
Stock Up: Cooper Rush
Someone has to deliver those passes though and Cooper Rush did a mighty fine job of that against Washington. He had a lot of clean pockets to work with, more on that in a moment, but that is in no way said to take away from the work done.
We rolled our eyes when the Cowboys said that Rush “gave them the best chance to win” and that proved itself to be true on Sunday. He is a steady veteran who has rightfully earned the trust of the coaching staff and executed what he had to against the Commanders.
He is a good and trustworthy soldier.
Stock Up: The offensive line
Greg Olsen, who for my money is the best color commentator in the game right now, kept losing his mind throughout the broadcast over how few pressures the Cowboys were giving up to the Commanders.
That this was the case with two rookies among the group, including the penalty-popular Tyler Guyton, and Terence Steele in his current form really says quite a bit about just how much they summoned from deep within themselves to play well.
Kudos all around.
Stock Up: Micah Parsons
First of all, Micah Parsons was phenomenal on the field for the Cowboys. That goes without saying.
But something he said after the game really stood out to me. Obviously the subject of tanking has been thrown around a lot and Parsons stood tall about how much he disagreed with it.
Cowboys DE Micah Parsons: “I’m not done yet. I don’t plan on tanking. If the higher-ups are looking for a draft pick, I hope that’s ruined, because we got a lot of football left to play. As long as I’m a part of this team, we’re always going to fight.”
— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) November 25, 2024
There have been a lot of words offered about Parsons’ level of leadership and what not over the last few years. I am not here to dissect that, but I am certainly here to stand tall myself and tell you that this is exactly how a leader of a football team speaks.
Can you and I debate the merits of tanking and treat the discussion how we want to? Yes.
Football players are fighting for their livelihood and do not discuss these things the way that we do and Parsons rallied the troops in the name of competing and did so better than the team they fought against.
Stock Up: Chauncey Golston
He has been having a really impressive season all year long and added to it with one of the quirkiest interceptions that you will ever see.
Like with the tanking thing, it is impressive to see someone a bit lower down the roster playing so hard from start to finish on a weekly basis.
Stock Up: Eric Kendricks
One of the things we discussed most around these parts was how essential Eric Kendricks was going to be to the operation of Mike Zimmer’s defense.
I’m not going to offer any claim that Zimmer has been a rounding success, but aside from the play that almost lost the game on Sunday (obviously a big thing!) they held strong and firm. More specifically, they dominated the beginning and early parts of the game. Again, chaos broke out at the end.
Kendricks was indeed the engine that powered the group and did so in impressive form. It is so good to see when a plan comes together.
Stock Up: Brandon Aubrey
I’m not going to act like Brandon Aubrey was perfect on Sunday because he obviously was not. But Sunday was a day where just about everything that could go wrong did and given that Aubrey’s predecessor let that get to him, unfortunately so, that he didn’t seems notable to me.
Also, if you allow me to add, Aubrey obviously had his first field goal blocked and missed another. That is objectively bad. We agree there.
But consider that Washington fans are all sorts of pissed off that they lost the game and are blaming their own kicker for missing a standard extra point. In the Brandon Aubrey era, as brief as it has been, we have never really done that.
You take what you can get!
Stock Up: Mike McCarthy, sort of
This is sort of a Brandon Aubrey-level stock up for me. I am happy for Mike McCarthy.
We started this discussion talking about how long it had been since the Cowboys had won a game and that has taken a toll, in different ways, on all of us. Clearly it is not fun to go through as players, coaches or anyone affiliated with the organization.
Mike McCarthy has a job and I imagine he would not complain about the pros that it offers, but there are certainly cons that come with it as well. The entirety of this calendar year has been rather unkind to him in terms of what his front office did and it all predictably blowing up in front of them all together on a week-to-week basis. Any win is a massive one these days, but a road victory when the explosions were happening left and right feels a bit different.
What’s more is there were so many people who have held firm in the belief that Cowboys players preferred Dan Quinn or something of that nature. That may or may not be true, but it had to feel pretty good for McCarthy to take out Dan Quinn and launch questions about being overrated and frauds in his direction.
None of this excuses the poor offensive design or continued thought that a CeeDee Lamb jet sweep will somehow save a game, but it was a nice overall day for and from Mike McCarthy.