ARLINGTON, Texas -- Micah Parsons isn't concerned with what he's able to achieve individually unless the end result is the Dallas Cowboys landing another win, but the two things were not in simpatico on Sunday. The rookie first-round pick essentially had his way with the Denver Broncos in Week 9, delivering 2.5 sacks for 19.5 yards lost, 10 combined tackles (eight solo and three for loss), and three hits on quarterback Teddy Bridgewater. That's a lights-out day for any defender, let alone a rookie, but it was all for naught.
The Cowboys desperately needed everyone else to match Parsons' determination and production, but for the most part, it didn't happen as the team looked lifeless and disjointed for most of the game. Anything that could go wrong for Dallas, did, and that includes after the game when a wasp tried to get acquainted with Parsons at the podium during his press conference. Parsons dodged it with the same finesse in which he slipped would-be Broncos blockers, but the look of frustration on his face said it all.
"It's just not my day," Parsons said.
Individually speaking, that's not true at all, but from the aspect of the team, it's very accurate. Parsons had a ready-made plan for working through it on Sunday night though, and it was a good one.
"But I got a new puppy," he added. "I'm gonna go home to him and we're gonna cuddle about it."
Parsons' puppy probably has more bite than the Cowboys did in Week 9, Parsons notwithstanding, and a large part of the defensive struggles stemmed from their inability to stop the run. The Broncos ran all over the Cowboys to the tune of 191 rushing yards, and that allowed Bridgewater space to operate in the passing game. A stellar 2021 campaign by Trevon Diggs was also victimized by the Broncos, who saw him yield two critical penalties that both helped Denver find the end zone in the first quarter and negated a diving interception by Jourdan Lewis just ahead of halftime.
Few things not tied to Parsons went well, and he's not mincing words about what the defense put on film.
"I feel like we didn't stop the run as well we did last week," said Parsons. "I feel like Denver played a really good job of running their game plan for us. Today, it just felt like we got out-hit today."
Could fatigue have had something to do with it, as the game wore on? It's likely, considering there was a complete absence of the usual complementary football everyone has come to expect from the Cowboys this season. The defense couldn't get off of the field on third down, time and again, and Dak Prescott couldn't extend drives to allow the defense to rest -- in what became a "one hand dirties the other" sort of tailspin. In all, the Broncos possessed the ball for 41 minutes and 12 seconds, which means the Cowboys possessed it only 18 minutes and 48 seconds, so of course the defense wore down.
But for Parsons, the young lion who never wants to leave the field, it wasn't about fatigue. It was about one thing and one thing only.
"No, I don't think we were tired. We just got beat," he said. "That's the nature of the game. That's the thing about football, any given Sunday you can get beat, today was our day.
" ... No, [I don't think we were feeling too good about ourselves]. Not at all. I just think they played really really good. They didn't get our best game, and there's no excuses why they didn't get our best game, but we're gonna learn and were gonna grow and we're gonna keep going into that right direction.
"That's the great thing about this game, next week we have another opportunity to be dominant. This game don't define us, it just makes us grow. We got next week so we're gonna try to go 1-0 again."
That said, Parsons does understand no defense (or team) can thrive having helped allow 41 minutes of possession while also trailing the entire game.
"Obviously, it was a much longer game for us, but we gotta find a way to get off the field," Parsons added. "There is no excuse for that. There's things that we practiced on and we didn't execute. That's the thing: you can have a game plan, everything can be right throughout the week but at the end of the day you have to go out there and execute and dominate, and I don't think we were able to do that. ... Granted, we gonna get better. We'll be ready."
You can count Randy Gregory in for potent criticism of what he saw on Sunday.
"At the core of it, we got outplayed," said a visibly frustrated Gregory. "Coach preached about it earlier this week: showing up with the right intensity, right mindset, right energy to out hit them, and we didn't do that. We're going to look at it tomorrow, and the next couple of days, and figure out what we did wrong and try to correct it so we can come out next week and get a win. ... You can definitely learn from this.
"Any win or loss you can learn from. That's what we'll do. We're not just going to burn it and move on. There's a lot of things we can take from it.
"We can learn from these experiences and come back better."
And as for the slew of missed tackles that helped torpedo the Cowboys in Week 9?
"As a defense, we had a lot of leaky arms -- made contact with the running back, and he got another three yards after contact," said Gregory. "Things like that, we have to clean up. We weren't really doing that earlier in the year. Everything else, it's like I said, we got kind of outplayed -- a couple of plays there, explosive plays.
"A lot of stuff wasn't working for us, but it's still early on in the season, and we have a lot of time to make up for it."
