METAIRIE, La. -- Quarterback Teddy Bridgewater's job won’t get any easier in his second start.

Although the New Orleans Saints are returning home to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome on Sunday night, they’ll be facing a Dallas Cowboys defense that basically manhandled them last year.

A 13-10 Cowboys victory in Week 13 snapped the Saints’ 10-game win streak -- and really knocked their offense back down to earth for the rest of the season. A replay of that game was running on all the TVs in the locker room on Thursday.

“Man, they beat us,” Saints coach Sean Payton recalled this week, offering no sugarcoating. “It was a tough game for us. We didn’t get much going. We didn’t protect the passer well. Penalties … they made the plays in the game that they needed to. It was a difficult game. It was one as a team that you try to shake off and get to the next week.”

Payton and Saints players like guard Andrus Peat have repeatedly pointed out that Dallas presents a unique matchup because “they are good on all three levels.”

The Cowboys got consistent pressure on Drew Brees in that game, thanks in large part to Pro Bowl defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence. The Cowboys defense had a disrupted dropback percentage (a disrupted dropback is a play ending in a sack, interception, batted pass or pass defensed) of 26.7, the unit’s second-best performance of the season. And their dynamic duo of athletic linebackers, Leighton Vander Esch and Jaylon Smith, combined for 19 tackles.

But perhaps what stood out most is how physical the Cowboys were against New Orleans’ top two playmakers. They were the only team to hold both Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara to 72 or fewer yards from scrimmage since Kamara’s first game as a rookie in 2017.

Thomas finally drew a pass interference flag and a defensive holding flag against Dallas Pro Bowl cornerback Byron Jones during New Orleans’ lone touchdown drive late in the third quarter. But for most of the game, it was reminiscent of the way the Seattle Seahawks’ great defenses used to dare officials to throw a flag on every play.

And that’s no coincidence because Dallas’ defensive backs coach/passing game coordinator Kris Richard used to coach Seattle’s “Legion of Boom” secondary.

Brees’ 3.7 yards per dropback in that loss at Dallas was the second-lowest total in his 14 years with the Saints. The lowest (3.69) was at Seattle in a similarly punishing loss in 2013.

“They're playing good football, and they're hot,” Bridgewater said of a defense that has helped the Cowboys to another 3-0 start this year. “We understand it’s going to be a battle. Last year was a physical game. I expect the same this year.”

What makes this test especially difficult for Bridgewater is he relied so heavily on Kamara and Thomas in last week's win at Seattle: 14 of his 19 pass completions, 146 of his 177 passing yards and both of his TD passes went to Kamara and Thomas.

This week, Bridgewater might need to prove he can get the ball to other weapons -- and can push the ball down the field to keep Dallas’ defense honest.

Bridgewater is averaging just 4.74 air yards per pass attempt this year, the lowest of any qualifying QB in the NFL, according to ESPN Stats & Information. He has attempted only 11 passes of 10-plus yards down the field in 63 dropbacks, and only one of 20-plus yards.

That conservative style was also common during Bridgewater’s first stint as a starting quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings from 2015-16.

But Bridgewater also said a lot of it had to do with the circumstances at Seattle.

“We wanted to cut back on some things, with all the crowd noise, the climate. Being back home, being able to use our own cadence and things like that, maybe we can do more,” said Bridgewater, though he made no apologies for taking a smart approach that led to zero turnovers and zero sacks last week.

“The thing with football now, everybody gets enamored with numbers and seeing the ball being pushed down the field. When those opportunities come, we want to take them and we want to take advantage of them. But at the end of the day, it's about winning football games, and that's my job. I just want to help this team win football games. The rest will take care of itself.”