Hours before the Dallas Cowboys’ matchup against the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara even began, Sunday Night Football got off to a weird start for the visiting team.
Starting running back Rico Dowdle was added to the injury report on Sunday due to an unexpected fever that ended up landing him on the team’s inactive list.
The news coincided with Saturday’s practice squad elevation of Dalvin Cook. With Dowdle being an inactive, that left Dallas with Cook and Ezekiel Elliott available for the game.
According to Calvin Watkins, Dowdle told the media "he woke up with a 100.8-degree fever on Sunday. Even when his symptoms of a flu bug subsided after taking Tylenol his temperature rose to 102.4 when he arrived at Levi's Stadium."
On social media, fans and content creators were not quite buying it. Many have tapped into the narrative that Dowdle being sick right on gameday was suspicious, with multiple creators explaining why it didn't make a whole lot of sense or why it seemed, at minimum, weird.
Personally, I'm on the "weird" side of things.
It's tough to fully believe it was all a conspiracy theory but you've got to admit there was some level of weirdness to the whole thing. First and foremost, and I say this will all due respect to Dowdle, players have played while being sick before. Micah Parsons did it for the Cowboys not that long ago when he played with the flu in December. Deebo Samuel's week started in the hospital for pneumonia-like symptoms before being released on time to play on Sunday night.
But okay, every case is different, and Dowdle might've really been hit by a bug out of nowhere. Even with that in mind, it's kind of hard to understand why if his symptoms were so bad he couldn't play, why did he travel on the bus to Levi's Stadium with his teammates? Why was he on the field signing autographs and looking completely fine? Or why was he, as Nick Harris reported, "seen in the tunnels walking in the stadium looking just fine and rapping along to a song he was listening to"?
To add to the whole mystery, whatever it was that was bothering Dowdle stopped being an issue very quick, as Clarence Hill Jr. reported the running back was no longer sick and could have played if there was a game on Monday.
As for a Cowboys' explanation, we haven't gotten a whole lot and we could use a more detailed breakdown of what went down on Sunday.
“When the team arrived, (head athletic trainer Jim Maurer) came in and told me that he was sick, so they reported it to the league, and then the medical staff treated him, and it was a medical decision for him not to be up,” Mike McCarthy told reporters Sunday postgame. "We waited until about 15 minutes before the 90-minute mark and made a decision."
But here's the thing: The Cowboys have refused to treat Dowdle as their true RB1 this season. Even in training camp and the preseason, Dowdle was not treated as the best player at his position, which he has been all along. After the best rushing performance by any back on the team in Pittsburgh, the gameplan featured Ezekiel Elliott over him a week later against the Detroit Lions. Even on Sunday when talking about his absence, it almost felt like McCarthy refused to label him the starting back.
"(The plan) definitely changed," McCarthy said about Dowdle being ruled out. "I mean, Rico was the, you know, you look at all the reps and where he was in the rotation; he was the first guy in the rotation."
One can't help but wonder if Dowdle wanted to play through the illness and was not given the chance.
I'm not going to definitively said something fishy happened (very respectable media members like Bryan Broaddus and Harris have argued against the storyline), but the whole sequence was weird enough to warrant a better answer as to why Dowdle didn't play. For now, Cowboys Nation should be hoping the best running back on the team is healthy and ready to go by next Sunday.
