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Cowboys mailbag: Questions on rookies, the bye week and KaVontae Turpin

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Cowboys mailbag: Questions on rookies, the bye week and KaVontae Turpin


Every week, we take questions on X (Twitter) and Facebook about Dallas Cowboys players and other issues surrounding the team. So let’s get right into it.

“Which of the rookies do you think have the biggest chance of make the final 53? And do any of the vets have to be worried about being replaced by the rookies?”

(@Rich Gillet on Facebook)

Mike: It wouldn’t be surprising if all the rookies make it on the team this year. The only one who might not is Nathan Thomas, depending on how the other offensive tackles develop. People were wondering if Brock Hoffman would start at center, but now Cooper Beebe poses a big challenge and might end up taking his spot before the season starts.

Ryan Flournoy poses a significant challenge to some of the veterans at the wide receiver position. During mini-camp, he left a lasting impression and even caught the attention of his fellow players. His emergence as a strong contender jeopardizes some of the bottom of the roster wide receivers who have hung around for a few years.

Justin Rogers serves more as a replacement for Johnathan Hankins. His presence, however, does pose a potential challenge for Chauncey Golston, as it may limit his playing time. Of course, this assumes that Golston can establish his role within the defense before the cuts are made.

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Dana: The first three draft picks of 2024 should find themselves on the final 53: Tyler Guyton, Marshawn Kneeland, and Cooper Beebe. Guyton and Beebe have a good chance to take over the starting roles for left tackle and center at some point this season, even if they aren’t quite ready for that responsibility Week 1. If Beebe does become the starting center, expect Brock Hoffman to remain on the roster for depth. The same might not be said for Chuma Edoga at the tackle position if Guyton solidifies his starting role, as there are a few younger tackles the team might want to develop instead. For example, the seventh-round pick Nathan Thomas.

The majority of defensive end snaps will obviously belong to DeMarcus Lawrence and Micah Parsons with an increase of snaps for Sam Williams from last year, but look for Kneeland to share a piece of that pie. Depending on how he is able to take advantage of his reps at training camp, that may not leave much room for Chauncey Golston when it comes time to set the 53-man roster.

As for the other draft picks, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see all of them make it to the 53-man roster. There were a lot of holes in the team before the draft and the Cowboys haven’t necessarily been shy about how much they are going to depend on their young guys this season. Marist Liufau (LB), Caelen Carson (CB), and Ryan Flournoy (WR) all have a really good chance to see in-game snaps this season. Justin Rogers (DT) could be grouped in there as well based on the lack of depth at DT.


“In your opinion, is the Week 7 Bye too early, too late or just right?”

(@MrEd315 on Twitter)

Mike: It’s definitely a bit too soon for an 18-week season. Going 11 weeks without a break, especially with the Thanksgiving portion where they have to play three games in 11 days, is a demanding stretch that impacts the players’ stamina.

There is an optimistic view, however, for where the Cowboys take this year’s bye week. The Week 7 bye allows the team to rest, recover, and gear up for a crucial match against their fierce rivals, the San Francisco 49ers. Historically, the Cowboys have a strong record of 4-1 in the last five years after returning from a bye week, which bodes well for their chances of defeating the 49ers on their home turf. This early bye week could be just what Dallas needs to secure a major victory.

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Dana: It’s always a bit difficult to judge the best time for a bye during the season as there are so many factors that could affect when a team needs the relief. Things like durability, injuries and opponents all play a role. Outside factors aside, the ideal bye would be smack dab in the middle of the season, Week 8 – Week 10. However, when you look at who the Cowboys play after their bye in Week 7, it might do them well to get the extra prep. The Cowboys will face the 49ers in Week 8. The 49ers have been dubbed as the Cowboys’ boogey man as of late, so the extra rest and prep might be the remedy needed to relieve that years-long headache.

The Cowboys also have a little bit of a mini-bye between Week 13 (Thanksgiving) and Week 14 (Monday Night). Hopefully that bit of a break later in the season will be enough to help the team finish the season strong.


“How much playing time will KaVontae Turpin get his year and will he get more snaps at WR this year?”

(@Glen Stevens on Facebook)

Mike: It seems likely that he will have an increased workload this year based on the signs we’ve seen so far. His name has been mentioned frequently during the install period, indicating that the coaches are exploring new ways to utilize his skills. Once the team arrives in Oxnard and we observe how the players perform and are utilized, we will have a better understanding of what to expect from Turpin this season.

Utilizing Turpin from the backfield or on jet sweeps and screen passes could greatly benefit the offense and force defenses to cover more ground horizontally. This, in turn, could create more opportunities for players like Brandin Cooks, who has shown to be more comfortable on this offense during the offseason.

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Dana: KaVontae Turpin had a pretty big jump in snaps since Mike McCarthy took over play calling for this offense. In his first season he had only one reception, whereas in year two, that number jumped to 12. With those 12 receptions last year, Turpin had 127 yards and three touchdowns. This year, the trust McCarthy has in Turpin should be even stronger. It also works in Turpin’s favor that there isn’t really a set WR3. The previous WR3 for the Cowboys had 57 targets last year. It should be expected that a portion of those should be reserved for Turpin.

The Cowboys are also testing out Deuce Vaughn for kick returns this season. Depending on how that goes, it may give the Cowboys more confidence in expanding Turpin’s role in the receiving game.

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Will KaVontae Turpin be this year’s WR3 for Dallas?

Be sure to check Blogging The Boys as well as @kenfigkowboy and @day_nuh_bee on X and also Facebook for the weekly post, asking for your questions to include in the weekly mailbag. Many thanks to everyone who send in your questions and votes.





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Dallas, TX

Top Dallas-area performers in Texas high school football, Week 10

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Top Dallas-area performers in Texas high school football, Week 10


Below you’ll find the top performances in rushing, receiving and passing from Dallas-area Texas high school football players in Week 10.

More Texas high school football content

Week 10 scores, stories for Dallas-area teams | Standings | Statewide scores

Rushing

Player, School, Yards

Darrion Bowers, Arlington Bowie, 244

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Deondrae Riden Jr., DeSoto, 208

Michael Henderson III, Wylie East, 190

Leo Anguiano, Prosper, 177

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Keenan Jackson, Haltom, 176

Vote for the week 10 Ozarka SportsDayHS hero. See the five nominees

Obadiah Goble, Argyle, 169

Terrence Collins, North Mesquite, 169

Brendon Haygood, Sachse, 169

Vudrico Roberson, Haltom, 163

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Jaylon Woods, Mansfield Timberview, 162

Ayson McCray-Jones, Hebron, 159

Alex Osterman, Aubrey, 158

TXHSFB central: Final scores, stories and more for Dallas-area teams (Oct. 31-Nov. 2)

Receiving

Player, School, Yards

Lovell Neal, W.T. White, 226

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Matthew McClain, Prestonwood Christian, 199

Triston Gooch, Rockwall, 188

Rockwall High Triston Gooch (8) takes his reception to the end zone for a touchdown during the first half of of a high school football game against Rockwall Heath high at Wilkerson-Sanders Stadium in Rockwall on Friday, November 1, 2024.(John F. Rhodes / Special Contributor)

Bryson Jones, Frisco Lone Star, 180

Lowery Asel, Frisco, 155

Cameron Lomax, Frisco Heritage, 150

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Will Krzysiak, Argyle, 147

Harry Hassmann, Coppell, 145

Kameron Powell, McKinney North, 142

Julius Spencer, Garland Lakeview Centennial, 136

Jamari Andrews, Mesquite Horn, 129

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Vincent Aparicio, Princeton, 128

Passing

Player, School, Yards

Marcus Flowers, Princeton, 457

Andrew Paredez, W.T. White, 407

Edward Griffin, Coppell, 403

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Hayes Hackney, Prosper Walnut Grove, 380

Walnut Grove player #2 Hayes Hackney hands off to player #1 Cam Newton during the Prosper...
Walnut Grove player #2 Hayes Hackney hands off to player #1 Cam Newton during the Prosper Walnut Grove High School at Melissa High School football game at Eagle Stadium in Melissa, TX, on Nov 1, 2024.(Jason Janik / Special Contributor)

Presley Harper, Richardson Pearce, 355

Luke Glass, Prestonwood Christian, 328

C.J. Daughtry, Mesquite Horn, 310

Cobyn Harbert, Frisco, 302

Chris Jimerson Jr., North Crowley, 297

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Buck Randall, Highland Park, 285

Graylyn Fry, Frisco Panther Creek, 262

Billy Middleton, Red Oak, 260

Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.

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Dallas Cowboys must cut the cord with failing defensive tackle

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Dallas Cowboys must cut the cord with failing defensive tackle


It’s not just one thing that has led the Dallas Cowboys to a 3-4 start this season. Inadequate offensive play and a defensive unit marred by injury are just two examples of what this team has dealt with. However, it is time to call out some of the poor play that has been happening this season.

2023 first-round pick Mazi Smith didn’t have the ideal rookie season. Smith started in three games in 2023 but never gave a performance that would be promising to the front office. Unfortunately, Smith’s 2024 campaign has been exactly the same.

Fans had a field day with Smith’s Pro Football Focus (PFF) grade last week when the Cowboys played the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday night. PFF grades are not meant to be the only thing that completes a player’s evaluation. But it is hard to ignore the fact that Smith ranks dead last with defensive tackles.

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MORE: Update on Trevon Diggs injury is nightmare for Cowboys depleted defense

Pulling the plug on such a young player is a difficult thing to do. However, the NFL is a fast-moving business. The Cowboys cannot afford to keep putting Smith on the field if these are the results he is bringing. It is time for the Cowboys to cut Smith.

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37 years as Dallas County’s medical examiner taught Jeffrey Barnard about death — and life

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37 years as Dallas County’s medical examiner taught Jeffrey Barnard about death — and life


Jeffrey Barnard’s office is nearly cleaned out: Gone is the grand, 500-pound bodark desk embossed with the Texas A&M seal. The trash is filled with empty Bubly sparkling water cans and there’s a box of snacks — including a bottle of apple cider vinegar he uses as salad dressing — tucked in the corner. Notebooks and papers are strewn across plastic tables, and he hurriedly tries to neaten them.

“I think I got most of the junk out,” he quips.

Jeffrey Barnard inherited a department in distress when he took the reins of Dallas County’s medical examiner’s office in 1991. In 34 years, the staff has grown, the number of autopsies performed each year has almost doubled, and a once-fledging crime lab has become a high-functioning department.

He left out a 1981 leather-bound ledger of cases — light reading since he’s been benched from the autopsy rotation in anticipation of his departure. He wants to walk out of the medical examiner’s office with no open cases. A desk clock, a gift from his wife, counts down three days, five hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds to his retirement. It’s been running for six months.

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A trained physician and forensic pathologist, crusader of public safety and administrator by necessity but not passion, Barnard is retiring Friday after 37 prolific years with the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, which houses the medical examiner and crime lab.

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Dallas County chief medical examiner retiring after nearly 40 years of helping solve crime

The roughly 140-person staff investigates sudden and unexpected deaths in Dallas County. An autopsy — where a physician cuts into a corpse — can take hours, while a report detailing the cause and manner of death can take months and requires as many as 10 people. The information the doctors, technicians, investigators, toxicology analysts and transcriptionists gather informs the justice system, law enforcement and public health. In 2022, Dallas County performed autopsies on 81% of its nearly 5,900 deaths, according to Barnard.

Barnard has spent the majority of his tenure as director of the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences and chief medical examiner — responsible for budgeting, personnel, occasional politicking and more than 300 autopsies a year.

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Dr. Jeffrey Barnard testifies during the January 2002 murder trial of “Texas 7” escapee Donald Newbury about the gunshot wounds that killed Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins on Christmas Eve 2000. Newbury was sentenced to death and was executed in February 2015.(2002 File Photo / Staff)

At 69, he’s focusing on other roles: husband, father, friend, doting grandfather, frustrated fisherman, attic-cleaner, fledgling writer and adventurer.

“Thirty-seven years, that’s a long time to do this,” Barnard said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “It’s time for somebody to have new ideas.”

After shepherding Dallas’ dead — victims of serial killers, mass shootings, plane crashes, Hurricane Rita, the Big Flood and a pandemic — he realizes he has put off too much living.

‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’

After medical school at A&M, Barnard did a year of general surgery residency in Temple. During a rotation in Harris County, working out of the basement of Ben Taub General Hospital, he was allowed to do things no doctor-in-training got to do — like exhume a pioneer grave out of a backyard. That case, he says, became the synopsis of a Patty Duke movie.

He followed a mentor to Suffolk County, New York, for a forensic pathology fellowship before coming back to Texas in 1987. Barnard didn’t expect to be here long, but 3½ years later, he became the boss. He says his rapid, unplanned ascent to chief was a combination of serendipity and good and bad luck.

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Then 35, he inherited a department in distress. Dallas had three or four medical examiners, Barnard recalled, and a ballooning homicide rate, which meant the office could autopsy only half of the cases that came through the door. In 1991, Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences had 99 employees and a $5.1 million budget. The 2025 budget is about $25.7 million.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who was on the court in 1991 and has been a confidant for Barnard, described the chief’s management as frugal and “no-nonsense.”

“He took a full complement of work just like anyone else,” Price told The News. “There’s no better respect for leadership than when the troops see you, as the kids say, grinding just like they do. You could call him — it didn’t matter — day or night, weekends.”

A doctor for the dead: How Dallas’ medical examiner solves crimes

Barnard rehabilitated and grew the staff; made strategic hires who took the physical evidence section from a budding DNA laboratory and made it a high-functioning office; modernized toxicology analysis; helped the office become a regional center to do autopsies for smaller counties; and helped design the state-of-the-art Stemmons Corridor office, twice the size of the former building where there was enough space for only six autopsies at a time.

The administrative tasks are something he has to do. Forensic work is what Barnard loves to do. Each case is a puzzle, a mystery to solve, a test of his merits. He’s not sure when his job became a calling.

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He performed the autopsies on Nancy Lyons, who was poisoned with arsenic; Aubrey Hawkins, the Irving police officer slain by the Texas 7 prison escapees; “American Sniper” Chris Kyle; Billy Chemirmir’s victims; and the autopsy of the 7/7 police ambush shooter (the only time he used the word “robot” in a death certificate). Among Barnard’s last few cases: homeless, alcoholic, natural causes.

Barnard’s driving purpose is summed up by fictional LAPD detective Harry Bosch, from Michael Connelly’s books: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”

‘You just got to keep going’

Barnard left the office early Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, and headed to the gym. He took off his Apple watch, unaware of the stream of notifications flooding his phone. After his workout, he checked the smartwatch and thought, Why all these calls?

It was his deputy chief. Gunfire had erupted in a second-floor office. An employee was injured, and medical examiner Beth Frost and her estranged husband were dead. James Frost is believed to have shot his wife and the other employee before turning the gun on himself.

Barnard’s silence worried his deputy chief. “I thought you might have been killed,” he recalls her saying. Barnard went back to the office. Over the next few days, he consoled staff that witnessed the shooting, dealt with other cases and met with Beth Frost’s family, he said. The Collin County medical examiner’s office handled the autopsies.

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Barnard was fond of Frost and devastated by the killings. He thought about retiring then. The murder drove home he couldn’t put off traveling with his wife, picking up the grandkids from school, mundane chores and embracing the unknowns. But he couldn’t bail on his staff. You have to keep going, you have to keep carrying the office, he thought to himself.

2 dead, 1 wounded after shooter opens fire in Dallas County medical examiner’s office

“For him to leave the ship at that time would have been like a ship without a rudder,” Commissioner Price said. “He needed to be there to be that glue that kept things together.”

About a year later, Barnard gave county commissioners notice of his intent to retire. The timing “wasn’t coincidental,” he said. His departure will come just before the two-year anniversary of the shooting.

“That’s asking a lot for somebody to keep going,” he said. “You’re having to hold it together, and you feel awful yourself, and everybody else is suffering and you’re suffering. You just got to keep going.”

A portrait of Frost hangs in the office lobby, above a bench. There’s a metal detector at the front door.

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Barnard compartmentalized his feelings for decades. He kept his head down, did his job and focused on the medicine. Frost’s death put into perspective the temporal nature of life and that there are loved ones — someone grieving like him — on the other side of every autopsy.

Legacy of hard work, inspiration

The long tenure has not been without controversy: In 1992, he was sued for not holding an inquest into the death of former President John F. Kennedy. (Barnard was in the second grade and not the chief medical examiner at the time of Kennedy’s 1963 assassination) Most recently, an NBC News investigation found thousands of unclaimed bodies since 2019 have been given to the University of North Texas Health Science Center per agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. The medical school has since stopped the program.

“It was a bad set of circumstances,” Barnard said, “but the real ultimate is what do you do to improve? And I think all we can do is try and expand more to finding next of kin. … It wasn’t that we did anything untoward, we were following by statute. Change the statute, change your policy — that’s the way you deal with it.”

Jessica Dwyer is Barnard’s successor, the county announced Monday. Dwyer — a fifth-generation Texan and fellow Aggie — will be the first woman chief. She joined the medical examiner’s office in 2017 and was promoted to deputy chief in 2023. In a statement, Dwyer called it a “privilege to work alongside” Barnard and said she is honored to carry forward “the legacy of excellence he established here.”

“She’s very talented and motivated, and I think she has a good vision,” Barnard said of Dwyer. “There will be things that’ll be different than I did — because there should be. Everybody looks at things differently, and she’s got some ideas that sound to me like really great plans to move forward.

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“The fact that she went to A&M was an even bigger bonus.”

When asked what he hopes for the next chief, Barnard said, “Good fortune.”

Barnard hopes his legacy is one of hard work, putting the public and taxpayers first, and inspiring the 70 forensic pathologists he trained. Although Friday is his last official workday, he must return to the Dallas County courthouse Monday to testify in a 1989 cold case murder trial.



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