Here is why football is maddening.
The Dallas Cowboys have been playing football since 1960. They have played a different opponent every weekend since 1960 in the autumn and winter and have a record book full of numbers. Thanks to awesome places like www.pro-football-reference.com and such, guys like me can do searches on mornings like this one to see how games like Sunday normally turn out.
When your offense scores 30 points (or more), gains 400 yards of total offense and runs for 150 yards on the ground, they win - regardless of anything else. We don't even look at defensive stats or turnovers or anything. Just those three numbers that demonstrate great productivity and plenty of it happening with a great ground attack.
Games over the course of Cowboys history where Dallas has checked those three boxes total 60.
They have done it 60 different times and have won 57 of them. 57-3 seems like a pretty solid trend, right?
November 10, 1975: The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Cowboys 34-31 at Texas Stadium on Monday Night Football despite Roger Staubach and the ground games of Robert Newhouse and Preston Pearson. Iowa Hawkeye Ed Podolak scored three touchdowns for the Chiefs and SMU's Mike Livingston had a rather pedestrian day at QB. The Cowboys turned the ball over seven times to explain this decision!
September 21, 1986: The Atlanta Falcons beat the Cowboys at Texas Stadium, 37-35. On this day, David Archer was the Falcons QB and Gerald Riggs did the damage on the ground, but this was clearly a day where four Cowboys giveaways canceled out all of their good work and made it a bad result.
So, basically, you see, the other two times the Cowboys have EVER been this productive and lost, they were handing the ball to the opponent seven and four times, respectively. In other words, the Cowboys have never had a day quite like Sunday. They turned the ball over three times in the record books, but two of those turnovers were on the final desperation play of the game. It is a technicality, and I only count one turnover as real.
Anyway you slice it, it had been 31 seasons since the last time lightning struck Dallas like this. And that is why on a day like today when we evaluate the offense, we must start from a place where we admit that almost every number the offense posted looks great.
WEEKLY DATA BOX
Again, look at this board. They brought home an offensive report card from this game with nothing but A's and B-pluses. The killer, of course, was the pick-6 and if you nitpick - like I did - then you also point out that they had to manage the clock better down the stretch. But, for the most part, there is nothing to point at this week where you would see a statistical shortcoming.
Unfortunately, if you are tired of the Cowboys losing to Green Bay, you are familiar with this. Under Jason Garrett, the Cowboys have played the Packers six times and the Cowboys offense has run for at least 134 yards each time. They run on Green Bay anytime they want. They also have scored at least 30 points on four of the six occasions. One of the times they didn't was the playoff game up there after 2014. That was a great offensive performance, too. The only time they didn't do whatever they wanted on offense was when Matt Cassel was the QB - and you remember how that went.
But, in the end, the frustration level rises because the offense plays nearly flawless football against Dom Capers, Clay Matthews, and the rest of that crew, and then leaves with a loss. Garrett is now 1-5 against Mike McCarthy.
DAK PRESCOTT THROW CHARTS
Dak was incredibly efficient and solid again in this spot and played a real strong game. With each passing week I keep coming back to Dak's best comparable has him as a "Big Russell Wilson" due to his ability on improv situations out of the pocket that make him so dangerous on third downs.
PERSONNEL GROUPINGS
It was pretty clear what the overall game plan was for Scott Linehan and Jason Garrett. Must control the ball and the clock and the ability to keep Aaron Rodgers off the field or limit his possessions as much as humanly possible.
Again, as we examine this, we see they did quite well. They held the ball for over 35 minutes. Green Bay had only seven possessions in the whole game which has to be a record low. I can't remember in all my years ever seeing a team with fewer than nine possessions in a game. Green Bay had seven. And won.
But, Dallas wanted to use powerful groupings to attempt to physically bully the Packers and keep moving the chains. Lots of fullback looks - 21, 22, and S21 are all with fullbacks - and lots of multiple-TE looks - 12, 13, and 22 personnel are all multiple TEs. That means there were 11 snaps with a fullback and 20 snaps with multiple tight ends. That is a huge number for bully football because they are all on early running downs. You challenge the Packers to match you physically and they did OK, but Dallas punted just once. Otherwise, it was keep rolling it down the field in methodical chunks. A 12-play drive to start the game. Then an 11-play drive, then a 10-play drive. All three in perfect succession.
Late in the game, the Cowboys needed one more. They took the ball with 9:56 to go and rolled out the mother of all drives - 17 plays, 84 yards, knocking 8:43 off the clock. It was textbook ground-and-pound late in the game and make the dam break.
Unfortunately, the length of the drive needed to either be much shorter or one minute longer to keep the ball away from Aaron Rodgers OR to preserve time to answer with yet another drive.
THE RPO
I obviously don't know what they discussed there, but I do know that they took their last three snaps after the two-minute drill with that preferred red zone offense under Dak Prescott, the RPO. They love this pistol formation with Zeke dictating the defensive posture and then whatever the defense chooses, Dak makes them pay. You cannot play the run and the pass with enough defensive troops. You stop Zeke, that leaves one-on-one chances through the air. You play with safeties back to help the corners, then you give the ball to Zeke and he eats. There is no good defense.
Here are the results to this point of the year on the RPO - mostly in the red zone.
But, what if you simply want to save the clock as a defense - do you bait the RPO into a throw? And would the QB know the game situation enough to not go for that temptation? And should he? These are the questions we are looking at in the aftermath of this loss. Call it second-guessing or Monday Morning QB (armchair QB is the variation), but I also think that is what we do here in our football study hall. Study the outcomes and the various choices on the road to that outcome.
Here is what we know about the RPO that the Cowboys have installed. They trust Dak Prescott as much as any second-year QB could be trusted to see it, read it, and make the right decisions. He almost always does. Here is his decision in Week 1 that gave them a rather easy TD to Jason Witten:
Then, at Denver, this one is even easier. Dez Bryant is being covered by a corner in the red zone in fade/back-shoulder fade territory. Easy.
They don't even care if it is Aqib Talib. The ball is going there and it is unstoppable.
How about Sunday?
Eight in the box? Sure. Stop Zeke. Then we simply run a slant/post behind it and there is no way to play leverage to the inside and outside at the same time with one guy. This is why you never throw interceptions - because you never are throwing to covered receivers.
So, it is simple and it is generally unstoppable. This is a growing part of the playbook, and with the game on the line, the coaches trust Dak to make the right reads. And he does. Over and over again.
1st and 10. Two minutes to play:
Two safeties high? Six in the box. You know how to do it. This is Zeke. Elliott gets 8 yards before the safeties can crash in and make a stop.
Now, the controversial decision is next. One that I wrote about yesterday:
So, here is second and 2 with 1:24 to go. Prescott's biggest decision blunder is to look at the Packers in pre-snap and diagnose what he sees as a call that is an automatic in the Dallas offense. You see a corner on his own -- this time, Davon House (a man released by the Jacksonville Jaguars in March and re-signed by his original Green Bay team shortly thereafter) -- trying to handle Dez Bryant in the red zone. This is a read the quarterback sees only on occasion since most opponents don't try it anymore, but when you do see it, the alarms go off. Tony Romo saw this at Lambeau Field when Sam Shields was trying to do the same thing back in January 2015, and now Prescott saw House on Bryant all by himself.
You always go to this throw. It is 100 percent the correct read, in a vacuum. But that decision was incorrect here.
If you go to that read, Bryant on House, you have a number of potential outcomes. The best one is a touchdown, which is great to give the Cowboys the lead, but then you give the Packers way too much time to answer to a three-point deficit based on lessons learned in January. Another not-so-great outcome is an incomplete pass, which gives Green Bay a timeout it didn't have to spare.
Prescott almost always makes the right decision. But here, you have to ignore your meetings and instincts and you have to play the game in front of you. In other words, this decision is automatic -- unless you are playing against the clock. On second and 2, you run the ball and keep the clock moving. You cannot allow the Packers to keep their timeout with the remaining time. The quarterback did not know his situation well enough at this early stage of his career.
Green Bay has its safeties still deep, but not nearly as deep. They are baiting you to make this throw. Nobody wants to blame Dak in the aftermath and maybe nobody should. Maybe the blame has to be on the coaches to ask him to give the ball or run it yourself to keep the clock moving. Maybe the coaches needed to run in there and demand that game circumstance require them to pull the keys out of his hands.
You can't throw there on second and 1. He is looking at the matchups and seeing an easy touchdown. Touchdowns are always good. But, the clock!
So, here is the that last RPO. As we mentioned, this is always a great read and the easy one. Dak can't sit down and write everything down. He has a sight read of the edge player No. 55 Brooks and whether he is crashing in or playing the QB. They even said after the game that they knew No. 52 Matthews was sitting on the keeper, so they ran the play away from Matthews and right at Brooks.
It was easy and he wasn't even touched. Back to what I wrote yesterday:
Prescott scored to give the Cowboys a 31-28 lead -- as any football player surely would have there -- but, we will always wonder if the only way to win this game would have been to "pull a Westbrook" and understand that not only did you have to score, but you also had to leave no chance for a response. He went in virtually untouched, and then it fell to the defense to save the game as Dallas kicked the ball back to Green Bay with 1:13 to play.
The offense did nothing wrong. They did plenty right. But, as I continue to say, when you have dedicated most of your resources to the offense, you might have to ask your offense to also be your defense.
In this case, and we will get to the defense tomorrow, asking Jourdan Lewis to stop Aaron Rodgers is a lower-percentage play than asking Ezekiel Elliott to burn the last minute off the clock with a simple second and 1 (and possibly third and 1 or fourth and 1) runs right at a tired Green Bay defense. We can only speculate, but I obviously have my beliefs.
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