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Learn more at vertexinck.com. This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Join me tonight.

It's my good friend Nate Tice.

Nate, how you doing, buddy?

I'm doing very, very well.

I'm glad we've eased into this with some other live shows. I feel just, I feel, I feel, I feel lubricated for this show. Like, you know, as opposed to most seasons where I felt stiff going into week one. I know, I couldn't find a better word. I feel very, I feel loose and ready to go for this season.

I thought week one was started with just so many interesting games, interesting outcomes.

I'm so excited to talk about it. And Sunday night game was a little anti-clamatic, but at least there's some things to talk about with the game, at least for one side of the ball. So let's spend a little bit of time on that before we dig into all the other games that we're going to talk about today. I mean, the Cowboys absolutely throttle the Giants 40 to nothing. Both of us pick the Cowboys to finish number one in DVOA, really would never advance defensive metric you want to throw out there before the season. Which everyone makes a slick smartest. I didn't expect that to start the year like that. Unbelievable. It was like they're taking turns too. I was like, all right, you got it. You get the pick here. That's the thing about their defense, though, is that they have so many guys who can make an impact, whether it's a front, the depth that they have in the secondary, but this sort of statement to open the season, their offense didn't do anything crazy and they still have really good players on that side of the ball. But for their defense to be this dominant, I think it justifies

anyone who came into this season with a healthy amount of Cowboys optimism. Seven different guys

got TFLs. That's pretty good. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, seven guys got TFLs. They got seven sacks total, just a whole bunch, a dozen hits. It felt just like, they just controlled it from Snap 1. It just felt chaotic on every play. And that's the thing is even with whatever you want to think about their offense, and that's the thing going into this game. It was the offensive line injuries.

And it was like, oh, here we go again with the Cowboys. They're missing half their starters. The offensive line's already falling apart. It didn't even matter. It's because the defense is going to dictate so many games. And in NFC, that does have some good teams that we'll talk about in the show, too. But there's a lot of bad teams in the NFC.

And that defense is going to go against a lot of bad quarterbacks, bad offensive lines, or at least incomplete units. And they're just going to control games like that, or at least keep the Cowboys in games, no matter what the offense is doing. I think Incomplete is a good way to describe the Giants offense. They still don't have a lot of weapons at their past catching spots. The offensive line is still very young. Evan Neal needed to take a huge step forward this year. I think he was my X factor when we did our Giants preview. I don't know if he was yours. And he didn't play great tonight. Any concern about the Giants after this game? Was this more of a they ran into a Cowboys defense that might just be a buzzsaw the

entire year to teams that are worse than them and are those sort of incomplete units?

They were the wall and the Cowboys were a juggernaut. They just ran right through. And I think

that's just what it is. This Cowboys team, even last year, it had some ugly wins early that they

squeaked out.

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