Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones labeled Trevon Diggs as “irreplaceable” after the Pro Bowl cornerback suffered a season-ending knee injury last week, but he thought the team had the depth to stay afloat in the secondary.

And while the former Alabama standout’s replacement, DaRon Bland, received praise after this first start of the season, the Dallas defense’s first outing without Diggs was a disaster. After the Cowboys limited their first two opponents to a total of 10 points, Dallas lost to the previously winless Arizona Cardinals 28-26 on Sunday.

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The Cardinals gained 400 yards, more than the Cowboys had yielded in their first two games combined. Dallas was gashed for 222 rushing yards – not Diggs’ area of impact. But in addition to running for 55 yards on six carries, Arizona quarterback Joshua Dobbs completed 17-of-21 passes for 189 yards with one touchdown and no interceptions for a passing-efficiency rating of 120.0. In his four previous NFL starts, Dobbs had a passing-efficiency rating of 81.3.

“No one has the impact that he has,” Jones said about Diggs between the cornerback’s injury on Thursday and the Cowboys’ game on Sunday. “The facts are that we do have depth. We don’t have depth with somebody that his very unique qualities have, but we’ve got depth relative to playing the position – and good depth.”

Diggs tore an anterior cruciate ligament at practice on Thursday.

Dallas defensive coordinator Dan Quinn said the loss of Diggs didn’t affect the Cowboys’ strategy too much.

“As far as play-calling goes, I think it’s honestly matchups,” Quinn said on Monday. “If there’s somebody we would put Tre to, are you still able to do that with the other guys? As we go through the season, we’ll work through that. We don’t move around a ton in terms of putting into matchups, and we hadn’t done that this year, so it’s not a lot we were doing.

“But it’s just hard to replace somebody with that kind of ball skills, and I really thought Tre was playing some of the best football that he’s played in his short career. We’ll certainly miss that ball-hawking mindset.”

Bland had been working as Dallas’ slot corner and shifted outside into Diggs’ spot.

“I thought he graded out well,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said about Bland on Monday. “Super consistent, battled. I thought he was one of the brighter spots on defense.”

Jones said Dallas would have to make do with what it has in its secondary because trying to add a Diggs-quality corner couldn’t be done.

“That’s just not real,” Jones said during an appearance on KRLD-FM in Dallas. “That’s like saying that I want to be Tom Cruise. The point is you don’t replace these irreplaceable players. We just committed – and are proud to have done it – to a very unique contract for him because he’s unique, and there’s nobody backing him up.”

Jones said if he had a choice between being Cruise and Diggs being healthy, he’d take the cornerback.

The Cowboys signed Diggs to a five-year, $97 million contract extension in July after he intercepted 17 passes, including an NFL-leading 11 in 2021, made the Pro Bowl twice and earned first-team All-Pro recognition once in his first three season after joining Dallas as a second-round draft pick in 2020.

“On Thursday, when that injury happened, you’d be surprised how many people would text me, ‘Next man up,’” Quinn said, “and I think if any of those people had been in the doctor’s office here outside the locker room and had to deal with somebody who was that hurt and broken, they wouldn’t say, ‘Next man up.’ There’s a player behind that helmet of what they stand for and who they are and how hard they have to work for it. And I think Tre was realizing in that moment, he’s not going to be able to do what he wants to do this year.

“Is he going to come back? Hell, yeah, he’s going to come back. But he also recognized that he’s going to miss a really cool moment with a special group of guys, so in that instance I wasn’t thinking about next man up. I was thinking about this player and this guy and the dude and what that is. It wasn’t an ankle sprain where he was going to miss two games. We’re going to knock him out for the year.

“He had a sense for where this could go and what we were going to be about, so that hurt him a lot. And it hurt some of the other guys, too, because they know how they are to him.”

The Cowboys play the New England Patriots at 3:25 p.m. CDT Sunday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.