CeeDee Lamb Is Having the Best Season in Football. The Cowboys Are Still 2-2.

CeeDee Lamb's Week 4 was the kind of line that gets replayed for years: 17 catches — the most of his career — for 189 yards and a 12-yard touchdown with 40 seconds left that beat Houston 34-30 in NRG Stadium. He was targeted 21 times. Nobody in the league has been fed like that, and nobody has produced like that.

Through four games, Lamb has 37 receptions for 498 yards and four touchdowns, numbers that put him atop the NFL in both catches and receiving yards. He has cleared 112 yards in three straight games, including a 153-yard, two-score afternoon against Washington.

That is the good news out of Dallas this week, and there is nothing complicated about it. The bad news is everything happening on the other side of the ball.

The offense is elite. It's also one-dimensional.

Dak Prescott is playing as clean as any quarterback in the league: 1,065 passing yards, eight touchdowns against one interception, a 70.0 completion rate and a 105.0 passer rating. The Week 4 win was the 85th regular-season victory of his career, tying Roger Staubach for second in franchise history. He took a cleat to his throwing hand in Houston and described himself as "perfectly fine."

Dallas scores 30.5 points per game, second-best in the NFL, and it does so almost entirely through the air — 266.2 passing yards against 89.5 on the ground. When Prescott and Lamb operate like this, the offense doesn't need balance. It needs its defense to hold up its end.

That defense has not.

The Cowboys allow 28.0 points per game and 392.8 yards per game. They are gaining fewer yards than their opponents are (355.8), which is why a 2-2 record feels more fragile than it looks. The point differential sits at just plus-2.5. Dallas's last two games have been decided by a combined seven points — a three-point loss to Baltimore, a four-point escape in Houston.

Some of this is attrition. Additional context on the injury report continues to grow: DeMarvion Overshown and Cobie Durant were ruled out for Week 4, and the secondary has been patched together with Malik Hooker, Shavon Revel and Jalen Thompson cycling through practice limitations. Lamb himself is on the report with a thigh issue, though he was estimated as a full participant early in the week, an encouraging sign.

The fix arrived via Pittsburgh

That need explains the biggest transaction of Dallas's week: the trade for Steelers cornerback Joey Porter Jr., completed for draft picks. The Cowboys have quietly built a habit of dealing with Pittsburgh, and this is the most consequential version of it yet — a young, long corner joining a secondary that needed help long before injuries thinned it out. Porter is working back from an ankle issue, and all signs point toward him making his Dallas debut soon, which would give the defense its first genuine upgrade of the season.

It won't solve the front. Dallas is generating roughly a sack per game — a pass rush that lets opposing quarterbacks operate in clean pockets, and a root cause of the 28 points allowed.

Thursday night is the soft landing

Week 5 brings Tampa Bay to AT&T Stadium, and the matchup is forgiving on paper. The Buccaneers are 0-4, scoring 19.0 points per game and averaging under 300 yards of offense. Baker Mayfield is sidelined by a right thumb injury, leaving rookie Jalon Daniels, whose season line reads 148 yards, one touchdown and three interceptions with a 46.9 rating. The market has priced Dallas as a heavy home favorite — the line opened at 9.5 and was bet down to 8.5 by game week.

The catch is that every Tampa loss has come by seven points or fewer, and a Dallas defense allowing 28 a game is exactly the kind of opponent that keeps a struggling team hanging around. If the Cowboys let a rookie quarterback march the Bucs down the field in the fourth quarter, the win column won't matter much to anyone watching.

The schedule after this gets serious quickly: at Green Bay, then at Philadelphia. Dallas is 2-2 in a division where the Giants sit at 3-1 and the Eagles are also 2-2, so the margin for an offense-only approach is thin. Lamb is giving the Cowboys a receiver season worth remembering. Whether the defense can be merely average will determine whether the season is worth remembering too.