It was only one one of 17.
This not the time to panic.
And the Dallas Cowboys remain confident in their team, culture, players and most importantly their defensive coordinator Christian Parker after Sunday’s 28-20 humbling and seemingly embarrassing loss to the New York Giants in the season opener.
A Cowboys team that entered training camp talking about reaching the Super Bowl and that become a trendy favorite by prognosticators who began believing that this might be there year served up a bunch of the same old sorry stuff defense against the Giants.
They gave up 394 yards of offense. They couldn’t rush the passer. They couldn’t stop the run. They couldn’t get off the field on third down.
It looked a lot like last year when the Cowboys fielded one of the worst unit’s in franchise history.
It left many wondering inside and outside building what the fuss was about, considering they were trotting out a new defensive coordinator calling his first game with a bunch of new players with no experience in the scheme and some new to the league.
“That was a tough pill to swallow last night,” vice president Stephen Jones said Monday morning on 105.3 The Fan. “Not gonna kid anybody. Felt really good and still do about our football team. We just probably had a little unrealistic expectations in terms of what we could do, especially on the defensive side of the ball with all the new faces and a brand new coordinator.
“We’ve got work to do.”
To his credit, Parker immediately went back to work after the game.
He was in coach Brian Schottenheimer’s locker room going over what went right and what went wrong as soon as the clock struck 0:00.
The Cowboys coaches didn’t get much sleep and Parker was in front of the staff going over his plan Monday morning.
“Yeah, he’s been great. He came into my locker room last night,” Schottenheimer said. “He and I talked at length last night in my locker room and just talked about his exposures and some of the things that he learned and some of the things that we wanted to do differently looking back. And again, very methodical as you would imagine, just like what we’ve seen with every experience and exposure to him, very methodical, very convicted, didn’t make excuses, need to be better, will be better starting with X, Y, Z. And he and I were on the same page with that, which is a good thing. And then this morning he was amazing with the staff and having hard conversations and real conversations. And this is not just the players, this is us as a staff.”
Schottenheimer is disappointed with the Cowboys’ performance and greatly surprised by the communication breakdowns that allowed the Giants to gash them repeatedly on Sunday night. But he remains steadfast in his belief that Parker can get things turned around.
“I have no question Christian Parker is the right guy for this job,” Schottenheimer said. “He’s an outstanding coach. He will learn from this, just like our young players are going to learn from this. We’re going to play our young players this weekend too, and they’re going to play better and Christian’s going to call a better game this week and feel better about it. So experiences gained by making mistakes and unfortunately we made too many mistakes last night. That’s why we came up on the short end of the stick.”
Schottenheimer also remains undeterred in his believe that the Cowboys can still reach all of their goals in 2026. He’s not apologizing for having high expectations and believes the team, along with Parker can navigate the growing pains.
“I think what I would say is our standard, our expectations, is high,” Schottenheimer said. “You stand up here and you talk about winning Super Bowls and it doesn’t change because we lost the game. That’s what our goals are. There’s some youth on defense. There’s some inexperience on defense. Christian Park. It’s part of the learning curve and we have to get better, but we’re going to make mistakes. And I see this defense every day and we did not perform well enough as a football team last night coaching and playing. It’s certainly not the standard, but I’m also not ready to say the expectations for where we think we’re going to get to as a defense and as a football team are not accurate.”
