​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. Jaxson Dart swings it out to Devin Singletary for another Giants TD!DALvsNYG on NBC/PeacockStream on @NFLPluspic.twitter.com/Z1q4jAeBkY— NFL (@NFL) September 14, 2026″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.”Cris Collinsworth: “I thought I saw some bad defense out of the Cowboys last year. That sequence was as bad as it gets… I don’t know who’s blowing these coverages…” 🏈🎙️ pic.twitter.com/JkuvCX8bPS— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 14, 2026Prescott and the offense ha