Free Friday: Cowboys get right in the Jersey swamp

Cowboys 20 at Giants 15

I try to keep the truly cynical recaps at a minimum, but this is the first time this year I haven’t exactly been excited to have football back.

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“The crowd is getting impatient, and I don’t blame them,” Al Michaels said in the third quarter. Under all that sloppy play married with holding penalties, there were two offenses in this game that couldn’t really run and could only target the intermediate area at best. The only completed pass over 20 yards was the one where Malik Nabers teleported past Dallas’ cornerback and had to wait for the ball to land. This game itself was a giant PPR scheme, so congratulations if you started any of the key players in fantasy.

Dallas’ run defense “fixed” itself, to the extent that it both couldn’t continue to be that bad and to the extent that, well, the Giants are not the Ravens or Saints. That was the major change of the game. But it wasn’t like Devin Singletary didn’t find his way through on key fourth-down scampers or anything. They just weren’t as threatened by the bad Giants offensive line or the multi-dimensional (read: bad at throwing and bad at running) Daniel Jones. The Giants are not the team to exploit weaknesses in your front seven. As for Dallas’ running game, they seem to think their best running back is CeeDee Lamb. That about says it all.

I’m not saying the fourth quarter of this game felt futile, but I think the Giants were trying to invent a six-point field goal and were disappointed to discover that such a thing wasn’t already on the books. Jones needs to get the Duke Law team on that.

Meanwhile, DeMarcus Lawrence missed big portions of this game, Micah Parsons was carted off in the fourth quarter, Malik Nabers was concussed on New York’s last gasp on fourth down with three minutes left. MRIs are coming for both Dallas’ main pass rushers. The human toll of these Thursday Night games continues to not be worth it. I hate them, and I don’t care how established they get, I will always hate them.

If the NFL ever does go to 18 games, I hope teams start treating Thursday Night games like NBA teams take the second half of back-to-backs and start “managing” star players. I think the NFL is cynically betting that quarterback play is too important to start benching people left and right, and they might be right. But boy it would serve them right if they were not.

Anyway, what did we learn? Not much. The Giants aren’t going anywhere, we knew that. The Cowboys are barely clinging on to relevancy, we knew that. The effort Dallas gave won’t get it done against a real team — good luck against Pittsburgh’s front seven.

In an industry where Zach Lowe can get fired, nobody is safe

Trying to talk about the internet writing industry with people who aren’t actually part of it can be hard because it can feel very obtuse if you aren’t in it. I can explain an NBC blurbing job to my in-laws until I am blue in the face and it doesn’t really register.

But this is actually pretty easy: ESPN had the best NBA writer in the business. He did great podcasts. His posts, if I were deeply into the NBA, would be must-read. (I happen to kinda think the day-to-day NBA is a little dull and pointless, but that’s not his fault.) He did TV for them. He mixed film and stats as well as anyone I’ve ever read. His name is Zach Lowe and they fired him.

I would have liked to have been born into this industry in a time where I could have wound up on a staff somewhere and not had to self-realize so many things I want to write or do. I tried as hard as I could to not have to do that, in fact. But this is where we are now: the best basketball writer, and I’d argue one of the best writers in any sport, was let go for no real reason. To balance some rounding error numbers on the shareholder sheet. I know if you read the story it says he had a million dollar salary or something like that — he was worth it and nobody will think about that million dollars when it gets reallocated to four people who don’t matter to us.

It is exhausting to try to run this and do traditional freelance stuff (speaking of: check out this D.Magazine piece!), and it really crimps a lot of spare time I’d like to have back. But it is even more exhausting to try to pretend that everything is going to wind up alright if I just keep grinding away for companies and applying to new corporate writing and editing jobs. Because what I have learned is: They won’t. If this place doesn’t exist, any home I have is temporary. The work I do have is about people who like my writing and believe in me. And there are more of you out there than I think there are, as much I can’t believe it sometimes.

I don’t like to talk a lot about taking a year off to take care of my infant son. I don’t like to talk about it because there wasn’t a lot of time that existed for me to be me, and that in turn makes me fairly grateful to be back writing and expressing myself. Even if what I came back to wasn’t exactly wonderful right away. But it was also a time where I was encouraged heavily to explore the idea of other, more consistent work. The truth of the matter is I didn’t entertain it all that much because I just couldn’t see myself “handling IT” or something like that. Couldn’t envision it. If there were more dire circumstances, where we absolutely had to have the money? Maybe I’d have no choice. But this is what I know and this is where I am. (And the truth is that very few people are irreplaceable in the eyes of the stock market today.)

It just sucks that no matter how good you are, no matter how expert the work is, that it will never matter to the MBAs who have control of the sector now. Because you can’t be better at your job than Lowe is at his and it didn’t even phase them to let him go a month before the season started.

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