Each answer to each question only strengthened my argument.
I watched some talking heads discuss the Dallas Cowboys’ upcoming season. It was the same rhetoric I’d heard and seen countless times before with countless teams on countless programs. The feeling of this experience being repetitive wasn’t a bad thing, though. It was quite the opposite.
The first question I saw was about Dak Prescott. I really like Dak. As a person — from what I know of him anyway — as a player, and as a clear improvement over what we saw in the second half of last season from the Cowboys’ quarterback situation. Still, there’s a limit to what a human being is capable of doing, and therein lies the purpose of such a question.
“Will Dak Prescott combine for at least 35 touchdowns through the air and on the ground?”
Without hesitation, one talking head answered “yes.”
I could see it happening. Remember, I told myself, we have an additional regular-season game. 17 contests could lead to inflated numbers and Prescott was on pace for close to infinity touchdowns last year before his devastating injury.
That wasn’t the only thing I “saw happening.”
As the question was being asked on television, I knew what the answer would be. Not the actual, end-of-season answer that will determine which side of the debate was right, but the answer that would be given for the question.
I knew almost anyone in sports media would have answered “yes.”
It wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t complex. It wasn’t a hot take — which is actually a good thing in that people felt they couldn’t even find a juicy answer that would get traction by being so different just for the sake of being so different.
I knew what the perception was.
And as I always write, we are successful by finding the disconnect between perception and reality.
The parade of questions continued.
“Will Ezekiel Elliott combine for at least 1,600 scrimmage yards?”
This was an interesting one. The Prescott question is surrounded by both a return from injury and the comparison to last year’s pace. Elliott’s has the same injury caveat, but the number, itself, is noteworthy.
1,600 yards would be akin to 100 scrimmage yards per game. As a featured running back, that’s almost a given.
Except it’s not 100 scrimmage yards per game. In the new 17-game season, it’s even less.
My intrigue with that question stuck with trying to first determine if the number was a mistake. Did they mean 1,700 yards and someone lazily typed 1,600 because of old habits? I’m not sure, but I was well aware of what would happen next.
I knew, once again, that the answer would be “yes.”
I’ll spare you the drama. It was.
Forget about the end result of the question again. I personally find it difficult to answer, but it’s irrelevant. We aren’t looking to figure out Ezekiel Elliott’s projections. We’re looking for an edge. And we’ve already taken two steps in the right direction.
Finally, the key question was asked.
“Will the Dallas Cowboys win at least 9.5 games this year?”
This should be even easier to answer than the first two. If someone has already landed on both Prescott and Elliott having big seasons and we do the simple math of a 17-game schedule, we know, yet again, that the answer will be “yes.”
When it was, I smiled.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
I probably touch on this in every single weekly picks article I write, but there are numbers that are just too eye-popping to ignore. They are the ones with easy answers. The ones that people will see and act immediately.
They are the ‘traps.’
The Dallas Cowboys’ win total is a ‘trap.’
Going back to the three questions asked about Dallas, all three produced quick and easy “yes” responses from the talking heads. Think about what that really means. It is not an endorsement of the Cowboys. It is simply the result of the numbers appearing too low.
Think about it from the other direction. What would the numbers have to be in order for all the answers to be “no”? 40 touchdowns for Prescott? 50? 2,000 yards for Elliott and 11.5 wins for Dallas? I have no idea, but I do know that the current bar is viewed as being ‘so low’ that every answer was easily in the same direction.
That is a ‘trap.’
One of the elements of a ‘trap’ — or any pick that needs some level of explanation beyond pure numbers in a matchup — is the narrative. Here, we have arguably the easiest narrative of all. Dak Prescott will return to the field and, the last time we saw him, he looked unstoppable.
People can easily take 2, add another 2, and produce 4.
Except, what if Prescott isn’t going to instantly revert back to the version of him we saw early in 2020? What if teams have a way of stopping him? What if he physically can’t?
The football-watching world has an extreme tendency of downplaying leg injuries for quarterbacks. We’ve seen time-and-again how quickly Carson Palmer or Carson Wentz — no name parallel intended — can fall off the map. We’ve also seen some players return to a high level, but it usually takes a lot more time than is budgeted.
Maybe Prescott is completely healthy. Maybe the Cowboys’ defense, which is a near-guarantee to be better than last year’s impossibly bad unit, shows some improvement. Maybe all the arrows go in the right direction. Even that is no guarantee that Dallas will win games. Don’t forget that the NFC East was putrid last year, and it is also likely to produce an overall positive correction.
When it comes to making official picks, I wait until August. There are too many moving parts before that, and we don’t really know how each team’s roster will look when Opening Day arrives.
The Cowboys are the exception for me because this setup is exceptional. We don’t normally have this many converging expectations that can all point to a single number and have it appear misaligned. I’m also being a bit more aggressive with the timing because we will have more than enough content on the Cowboys in the coming weeks.
Dallas is the team featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks.
It’s the team everyone will watch.
It’s the team where fans will find the hard-working backup running back or the reinvented cornerback or the lovable coach.
It’s the team that will be viewed in a positive light.
Once again I write that this setup is exceptional.
And, even if it’s a month earlier than normal, I will not let exceptional value go unnoticed.
Pick: Dallas Cowboys UNDER 9.5 Wins (-110 on FanDuel Sportsbook)