Leading up to the Dallas Cowboys' Sunday night matchup with the rolling Tampa Bay Buccaneers, some moderately contrived media speculation centered around the recent struggles of rookie quarterback Dak Prescott and the possibility that Tony Romo might resume his role as starting signal-caller. Prescott responded admirably enough, completing his first nine passes en route to a 32-of-36 night with one rushing touchdown and no interceptions in a 26-20 win. He was good.The Dallas running game, on the other hand, was spectacular, as it has been all year. Behind the NFL's best offensive line, Ezekiel Elliott ran for 159 yards and a touchdown on 23 carries. Nearly every rush worked with diagrammatic precision, with the front five bowling over one line of defenders before engaging another, while the runner went slaloming on through. There may be no more intimidating sight in football, at this moment, than Elliott taking a handoff and pausing, giving his blockers an extra second to do their mean work. They simply expand, like some kind of power-squatting spray-foam engineered to eradicate tacklers. Elliott often employs his first juke or stiff-arm five yards past the line.
The ground attack produced its share of top-grade highlights on Sunday. Late in the third quarter, Elliott took a toss to the left, Dallas linemen chopped down Bucs in front of him, and he hurdled over the scrum and darted up the sideline for 20 yards. Midway through the fourth, behind a Doug Free/Zack Martin double-team that could have leveled any number of municipal structures but settled in this case for the Tampa defense, Elliott stutter-stepped and breezed for 42 more. Elliott's lone touchdown of the day, back in the second quarter, was most notable for what followed; after a two-yard run up the gut, he celebrated by hopping into the NFL-player-sized Salvation Army pot back of the end zone.It was a pair of plays just before that touchdown, though, that most stayed with me. With the Cowboys taking over 14 yards from the end zone after a Jameis Winston fumble, the line drove a sizable wedge through the Bucs, and Elliot ran left, hopped over one arm-tackle, and picked up seven. A play later, when the Tampa front stood strong, he dropped to knee-level and scooted to within inches of a first down. The two rushes produced only nine yards—which means, remarkably, that taken together they lowered Elliott's average on the night—but they summed up the rare rapport in Dallas. The offensive line gives Elliott more room than anyone else gets, and then he does more with it than anyone else can.We have not seen the last lingering sideline shots of Tony Romo. We have not heard the last speculation about Prescott's job security. A simple truth holds, though. The most important thing any Cowboys quarterback can do, this season, is turn around and hand the ball off.
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