There's No Silver Lining for Mediocre Dak Prescott and His Mediocre Cowboys

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and former Cowboys Dez Bryant were spotted together at the Jay-Z/Beyonce concert Tuesday night, two days after Bryant spent his afternoon throwing Twitter shade at his former team during an ugly 16-8 loss to the Panthers.

It's hard to tell what song was playing when that photo was taken, with Bryant mugging for the camera and Jerrah looking like a grandpa seeing Beyonce for the first time. Based on the unlikely nature of the Dez-Jerry meetup, it must have been "I Miss You," or maybe "Ring the Alarm" for the state of the Cowboys. Or, considering Bryant's recent tweets, "Resentment."  

Jerry and Dez's Bonnie-and-Clyde (last one, we promise) hangout was just the latest sign of fractured loyalties and puzzling alliances within the Dallas Cowboys Extended Dramatic Universe (DCEDU).

Jones defended Dak Prescott on Dallas radio earlier Tuesday, suggesting the quarterback who threw for only 170 yards and was sacked six times against the Panthers lies somewhere between Jared Goff and Cam Newton on the quarterback continuum, according to Jon Machota of the Dallas Morning News.

Right. And Derek Carr is somewhere between Ken Stabler and Alexander the Great.  

You have to admire Jones for offering us a glimpse into his head-canon quarterback rankings—you can almost hear him referring to Prescott as a "QB2" like some fantasy guru—but anyone who has recently watched the downward-spiraling Prescott knows the former rookie phenom is between a rock and a hard place right now, not a rising star and a former MVP.

Bryant, meanwhile, prepared for the concert by tweeting a Dez-related Stephen A. Smith sound bite and adding, "The problem was my ex teammates respected me more than my coaches."

Bryant then quoted that tweet within another tweet before quickly deleting what looked like an attempt to interact with himself via an anonymous burner account.

Like Jones, Bryant is all about sharing his internal dialogue with the world. No wonder they're concert buddies.

Elsewhere in the DCEDU this week, head coach Jason Garrett defended offensive coordinator Scott Linehan, whose dishwater-dull play-calling caused Fox analyst Troy Aikman to remark during the telecast that he was "not seeing any creativity." Aikman played for Norv Turner, making him a difficult man to bore, game plan-wise.

"I have a tremendous amount of faith in Scott," Garrett told reporters, which is as close as someone can get to giving a vote of confidence without saying I grant thee a vote of confidence. We all know what votes of confidence mean in the NFL, right?

Meanwhile, Cowboys executive vice president/crown prince Stephen Jones called those who questioned the team's play-calling "armchair quarterbacks" during a radio interview, via Clarence E. Hill Jr. of the Star-Telegram, perhaps forgetting that Aikman rests three Cowboys Super Bowl rings on the arms of his chair. But Jones the Younger also may have been referring to Bryant, who is not a quarterback and watches the Cowboys from what he describes as a "big, beautiful-ass couch" in lieu of being on the field with them.

Whether he was criticizing a Hall of Famer or daddy's concert-night plus-one, it wasn't the best choice of words from the heir to the throne.

So Bryant hangs out with Jerry, Jerry defends Dak, Garrett supports Linehan, Aikman and Bryant are critical of Linehan, Jones the Younger is critical of Aikman and/or Bryant and Jerry sounds passive-aggressively frustrated with either Garrett or Linehan—he praised Norv Turner's work with Newton while calling the former Cowboys coordinator "as traditional a play-caller as you can ever imagine" during his radio spot—before chumming it up with Bryant.

A flowchart of these relationships would look like a plate of linguine, and both Bryant's Twitter feed and the Jones interviews on 105.3 The Fan are far more exciting and competitive than the Cowboys offense right now.

Compared to the 2018 Cowboys, the plot of Avengers: Infinity War was easy to follow. But you don't need to keep track of every character to get the gist of it. Last week's game was ugly, and the Cowboys will start looking for scapegoats if the offense doesn't start showing life signs Sunday night against the Giants.

Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Linehan is the most likely candidate to lose his job, or at least his play-calling duties, once the roulette wheel of blame stops spinning. That's how the NFL works: Coordinators are ritually sacrificed to preserve head coaches and quarterbacks, as well as general managers in cases where the front office isn't ruled by a hereditary monarchy.

Linehan, like most long-tenured NFL offensive coordinators, looks like a genius when given outstanding personnel, but he's just another guy with a headset when he doesn't have a future Hall of Famer or two to work with. Play-calling was easy with three All-Pro linemen, Bryant and Jason Witten in the huddle in 2016. Replace Bryant and Witten with Deonte Thompson and Geoff Swaim—and take away Travis Frederick, who was diagnosed with a rare illness in August—and those play-action passes suddenly no longer look like tactical wizardry.

Scapegoating Linehan is easy, and doing so can prevent Jerry & Son from asking any hard questions about Garrett, Prescott or themselves, which is why the Cowboys are so likely to do it.

Garrett's immunity from consequences within the Cowboys organization remains one of the NFL's greatest mysteries. Garrett is an offensive coach who is supposed to have a heavy hand in game-planning, so any shortcomings on Linehan's part should reflect negatively on him, too. But that logic has never once in NFL history saved a coordinator's job.

Bryant's pointed remarks about disrespect from his coaches also reflect poorly on Garrett and his staff, although we should probably take the complaints of someone self-actualizing via a burner account with at least a small grain of salt. Whatever went sour in the Bryant-Cowboys relationship, the team failed to find half-decent replacements for Bryant or the now-retired Witten. That's a Jones & Son failure, which means it's a can to be kicked down the road until it lands in front of someone expendable.

Finally, there's Prescott, who has thrown eight touchdowns and nine interceptions while absorbing 31 sacks in his last 11 games, throwing for over 200 yards only three times in that span. Prescott looks more and more each week like an ordinary-at-best quarterback who got hot under ideal circumstances for a few months as a rookie and has been slowly regressing ever since.

Prescott is Jones' genius move, the quarterback (according to revisionist history and retcons) he always secretly coveted, even when he was pretending to prefer Johnny Manziel and Paxton Lynch to throw other teams off the scent. If Prescott isn't the Next Great Cowboys Quarterback, well, heaven help whoever broke him. Which brings us back to Linehan as Garrett's human shield.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

It doesn't matter if the finger eventually points at Linehan, some overmatched receiver filling Bryant's shoes or even Garrett. Firing coaches or changing play-callers won't turn anyone into Bryant, just as comparing Prescott to Newton won't make it anything but an expired 2016 pipe dream.

Mediocrity is baked into the current Cowboys. Mediocre ownership is saddling mediocre coaches with mediocre receivers and dragging a once-promising quarterback into the mediocrity while truly good former Cowboys quarterbacks and receivers comment from the booth or couch. What we saw in Week 1 is what we're going to get for the rest of the season, no matter who draws up the plays.

For now, everyone's job is safe. Bryant has declared a Twitter cease-fire, and the Cowboys are facing a Giants team with its own on-field problems, although none of the off-field ones.

The Cowboys offense probably won't be worth watching Sunday night.

But the postgame reactions from the colorful characters of the DCECU will be priceless.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter: @MikeTanier.