Romo's Record Falls. The Defense Is Still Falling Apart.

Dak Prescott passed Tony Romo as the Cowboys' all-time touchdown leader in Week 2, which is the kind of milestone that gets a graphic on the scoreboard and a mention in the history books. It deserves that. Romo held that record for years as the face of a franchise that kept promising deep January runs and kept coming up short, and Prescott surpassing him is a genuine marker of longevity and production at a position where both are hard to sustain.

The problem is that the offense earning a franchise record and the defense burning through emergency personnel are happening at the same time. I noted two days ago that Overshown's hamstring had pushed the Cowboys to the practice squad for linebacker help. That situation has not resolved. The linebacker room was already thin coming into this season — the kind of thin where losing one starter changes the math entirely — and the secondary has been similarly depleted. The defense that was supposed to be rebuilt around a few key pieces has watched those pieces go down in sequence.

So Dallas is in a familiar place: Prescott doing his part, the offense functional, and the defense creating a ceiling the offense can't punch through on its own. The record is real. The roster problem is also real. Both things fit in the same sentence right now.