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The last time they were on the football field, the Cowboys defense gave up nearly 500 yards and 47 points. If you’re measuring solely by point margin, you’d have to go back to 1988 and the final year of the Tom Landry era to find a worse defeat.
While the bye week offered Cowboys coaches a chance to take a step back and figure out what has gone so off the rails this season, it also gave several injured Cowboys defenders an extra week to heal up before the next game versus the San Francisco 49ers.
While DeMarcus Lawrence, Eric Kendricks, DaRon Bland, Marshawn Kneeland, and Caelen Carson were certainly missed versus Detroit, no one’s absence on the defensive side of the ball was felt more acutely than that of Micah Parsons.
But the 25-year-old, who sat out his first game ever because of an injury in Week 5, then missed a second straight game in last Sunday’s 38-point loss, says he’s optimistic he’ll be ready to go by the weekend.
“My hopes are always very high,” Parsons said Monday, regarding his chances to suit up at Levis’s Stadium on Sunday. “I love great challenges. I love being able to beat the odds. I’m going to put this up to my trainers and my coaching staff.”
The two-time first-team All-Pro suffered a high-ankle sprain in a late-September win over the Giants. Since then, the Defensive Player of the Year hopeful has been working hard just to get back in the lineup.
“Micah’s making progress,” head coach Mike McCarthy told reporters Monday, even confirming that Parsons had put in additional work over the bye week.
“Micah was here. He”s doing good; he was in here every day going through rehab. We had, obviously, a big group in here all week last week. Hell, there’s a lot of guys in here working extra. I’m always appreciative and impressed with that… You couldn’t tell it was a bye week, just based off the number of guys I saw in the building throughout the week.”
Monday was scheduled to be a light day for players in terms of actual drills, so the coaching staff may not get a strong indicator of Parsons’s readiness until midweek.
“It’s still in the air,” Parsons explained. “Obviously, it’s more than just me. I have to clear it with Britt [Brown, Cowboys director of rehabilitation], the coaches, the head coach. They want to make sure — obviously because there’s so many games left — that I come back at the best result. Sometimes, it’s not always the player’s decision. It’s the people with the higher pay grade.”
Parsons admitted to media members that he wasn’t really close to playing against the Lions in Week 6, though he’s been taking it day-by-day since.
“The thing with my injury is that it’s determined person-to-person,” Parsons said.
“It’s more of just getting the sense of how I explode back. Just acceleration and things like that. That’s the biggest thing for me.”
It will also be an awfully big thing for Dallas as they face a longtime NFC nemesis and begin a brutal five-game stretch that could go a long way in deciding the season before Thanksgiving.