New season, same Cowboys. Dallas once again smashes its fans' hopes in New York face-plant

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 30 times, call me a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Once again, the Cowboys and their defenders rolled into a season insisting that this was The Year, that Dak Prescott was in his prime, that the newly retooled defense would complement an explosive offense, that the highest of hopes were now in play.

It all sure seemed like awfully big talk for a team that finished 7-9-1 last season. But Prescott sported a Super Bowl XXX shirt — the last time Dallas won the game — during training camp this summer, and team owner Jerry Jones left no doubt about his expectations.

"Contend for a Super Bowl," Jones said earlier this summer . "Those are the kinds of things that I don't believe are … outlandish or a reach to expect."

Yeah, about that. After Sunday night's season debut, a 28-20 pantsing at the hands of the division rival New York Giants , perhaps Dallas ought to set some more realistic goals. Like, oh, not allowing touchdowns on three straight possessions? Or not getting bamboozled by the exact same play four times in less than two minutes? Maybe start there and worry about the stretch goals later.

"As a football team, we were pretty poor," head coach Brian Schottenheimer said after the game. "Just give Coach [John] Harbaugh and his team a bunch of credit. They were the more physical team tonight. That's certainly not our standard … This is a humbling business, and we got humbled."

Where do you even start after this flop of a performance? There's so much blame to go around, everybody gets a third serving. The defense will come in for the most severe scorching, and deservedly so.

New defensive coordinator Christian Parker's men looked overmatched and underprepared, surrendering both lightning-quick and slow-bleed drives on the night. Most damning of all, the Cowboys let the Giants run the same play — Jaxson Dart finding running back Devin Singletary wide open in the left flat — time after time in the fourth quarter with the game still reachable at 21-14. Singletary finally found the end zone, capping off a second straight eight-plus-minute second-half drive.

"He'll learn from it, we'll learn from it," Schottenheimer said of Parker. "He's gonna be hardest on himself anyways, he and the defensive staff. But at the end of the day, when you look at the numbers, I mean, they were 4-of-4 in the red zone. They were 9-of-11 with a kneel down on third down. It's just not good enough. And so we gotta figure out why, and we gotta do it in a hurry."

Prescott and the offense had their own struggles, particularly in the first half. The killer: an interception that Prescott unwisely underthrew while trying to get the ball out of bounds. The Giants flew 55 yards down the field in 29 seconds, scoring just before the half, and then methodically stomped down the field in 8:01 to open the third, turning a 7-7 tie into a 21-7 lead without Dallas ever touching the ball.

"That's unfortunately what we call a double dip," Schottenheimer said, "and they double-dipped us."

Prescott led Dallas into the end zone every time he touched the ball in the second half. Unfortunately, the Cowboys had only two possessions during the entire second half, with New York controlling the ball — and squeezing the life out of Dallas — for nearly 22 of 30 minutes. You can't make plays when you're on the sideline. And Prescott ended the game with a paltry 175 yards on 22-of-34 passing, with two touchdowns and that one backbreaker of an interception.

"It's one game. This is a long year," Prescott insisted. "We've got to make sure we use it as a lesson: stick together. One of two things can happen. We can get better from it, or we can allow it to derail us. And I know what I'm gonna do."

Unlike many markets, where bandwagon Dallas fans outnumber the local ones whenever the Cowboys come to town, the Giants' Big Blue nation swarmed the Dallas infidels. Even outnumbered, Cowboys fans had no problem talking tough on the walk in to MetLife Stadium, but the way out was surely much quieter from the Dallas contingent.

"We lost mile 1 of a 17-mile marathon, and we have to be better," Schottenheimer said. "We will be better. The only way to do that is to get back to work."

Next up for the Cowboys: another divisional matchup, at home against Washington. It's a long season, and it still could very well end with Dallas hoisting a Lombardi Trophy at the end of it. But organizational collapses like this make it very tough to believe that's anywhere close.

"It sucks to lose. It damn sure sucks to lose the first one to this team in a division game, but [we're] still optimistic," Prescott said. "That doesn't change our goals, doesn't change how we feel about our team."

It probably won't change the way Cowboys fans feel about their team, either. But you do have to wonder how many more underachievements like this have to happen before those fans start asking some really hard questions, both of their team and themselves.