Dak Prescott and Mike McCarthy showed the right kind of honesty after the Broncos beat the Cowboys

The Cowboys’ resilience is being tested.

Nobody is going to feel better about Sunday’s Dallas Cowboys loss. Nobody. There is nothing that can be said or anything that can be explained in any way to help soothe the embarrassment that this team took at the hands of the Denver Broncos. Sometimes that’s just the way that it goes.

In times like these what we want to see from the Cowboys is accountability. Coaches and players taking accountability for a loss is the right place to start after a game like this and that is exactly what the Cowboys are getting which is nice to see, all things considered.

It doesn’t take a football genius to have seen that Dallas was flat against the Broncos on Sunday. Many believe this kind of behavior is often something that happens when teams are feeling themselves a little bit too much after a run of success and Dak Prescott, to his credit, sort of owned up to the fact that the Cowboys might have been enjoying their run of success a little bit too much.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone even now that believes the Broncos are a better, or more talented, football team than the Cowboys, but being better isn’t enough. You have to take your opponents seriously and show up for work because they are going to and if you don’t it might be a bad day for you. It was that kind of day for the Cowboys.

Interestingly, Mike McCarthy had a different sort of accountability when he spoke, something to do with a message that he specifically preached to the team this past week. Dallas entered Week 9 as one of the most penalized teams in the league, something we talked about here, and McCarthy admitted that he might have focused too much on that and therefore tweaked a little bit more than what he should have.

Dallas only had five penalties on Sunday which was an improvement on where they were at in that particular capacity. The Cowboys were averaging 8.3 penalties per game prior to Sunday’s loss, but to McCarthy’s point perhaps the Cowboys went too far with this approach and therefore lost some of their physical-ness making the trade off not worth it.

These admissions by Prescott and McCarthy are great to see, but they will only truly be meaningful to people if Dallas comes out and responds next week against the Atlanta Falcons. It will be a long week until then as weeks following losses tend to be.