The Dallas Cowboys will always find a way to disappoint.

They went into last night with arguably the hottest offense in the NFL, facing an 0–4 Tampa Bay team led by undrafted rookie Jalon Daniels, who was making just his second NFL start.

We expected a competitive game because Tampa’s defense has been much better than their record suggests. But I don’t think anyone expected the Cowboys offense to struggle quite this badly.

Dallas managed just two decent drives all night. The first was on their opening possession, and the second was after Todd Bowles made a boneheaded fourth-down decision at his own 1-yard line, practically handing Dallas a touchdown.

In two other drives, including one to tie the game late, they turned the ball over.

And while the offense struggled, the defense made Jalon Daniels look like one time Buccaneers quarterback Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr.

Tampa Bay walked into Dallas, picked up its first win of the season, and left the Cowboys with plenty to think about.

Just another Thursday night in Dallas.

We did have picks last night so let’s see how those did.

Dak beats the unders again, but we’ll celebrate the margin.

We went into last night’s game backing Dak Prescott’s unders once again, despite him beating every passing under our model has picked for him this season. We approached the picks with some trepidation, knowing how badly Dak has burned us before.

And once again, he made us regret it.

He finished with 24 completions on 42 attempts, throwing for 316 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions.

The frustrating part is that Tampa’s defense played exactly as well as we expected. They disrupted the Cowboys offense, limited CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens, forced turnovers and held Dallas to just 16 points.

But with Dallas trailing for much of the second half, Dak kept throwing. He finished well above our 34.5 attempts line and narrowly cleared the 23.5 completions line.

And that’s been the problem with backing Dak’s unders this season. The Cowboys have struggled defensively and do not have anything remotely close to a reliable run game, leaving Dak to repeatedly try to throw them out of trouble. Even when the offense struggles, he still gets enough passing volume to beat these lines.

That’s an 0–2 night for our featured bets.

We’ve now backed Dak’s passing attempts under multiple times this season without success. The model will keep using the updated data to account for his passing volume, particularly when Dallas falls behind and has to chase the game.

The good news is we don’t have long to wait for more football.

Sunday brings another full slate, and we’ll be spending the next couple of days watching the prop markets as they settle and running the latest numbers through our models.

And while we’ve been deeply engrossed in the NFL, the NBA preseason is already underway. We’ve also been doing some work on our NBA models ahead of the new season, and we’ll have a few updates to share tomorrow.

In the meantime, you can see which props are gaining attention on Trending Props and where the lines are shifting on the Boosts page.

Join the conversation on Discord to share slips, compare reads, and talk through the upcoming slate with the Propsguru community.

We’ll be back tomorrow.

— Propsguru