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By Bob Sturm May 4, 2020 47
The Spring of 2014 was filled with a fair number of meetings and decisions in the Cowboys coaching room. In retrospect, that made a great deal of sense. It is clear that as Rod Marinelli was elevated and placed into power as the defensive coordinator after a horrific 2013 for the Monte Kiffin-led defense, the ideas behind the team’s defensive strategies would not be any sort of an independent effort anymore. There would be a global view of how the defense and the offense would complement each other.
Rumors slowly emerged that Dallas wanted to replicate the model the Seattle Seahawks used to win the 2013 Super Bowl and 24 regular-season games in their last two years with a team full of kids. They looked like the all-new power in the NFL, and they were doing it nearly from scratch. Their main rival appeared to be the San Francisco 49ers, who were largely doing the same thing with another group of kids. They had won 23 regular-season games in their last two years and had lost a Super Bowl. Those franchises were playing defense-first power football. The Seahawks were passing for the 26th-most yards in the NFL and the 49ers were passing for the 30th-most over those two years with QBs named Wilson and Kaepernick, who were both making no money on rookie contracts they signed after being selected outside the first round. But it was winning football because they could run the ball very well and the defenses were both Top 5.
The NFL had turned the corner. Maybe those teams with franchise QBs were not headed in the right direction. Over 2012 and 2013, the Seahawks and 49ers had won the most games in the NFC and had passed the ball less than anyone in the entire NFL. Technically, the Seahawks had passed less than the 49ers, but they were 31st and 32nd in passes thrown over two seasons where they had won a ton of games. Isn’t this interesting? Then, when they faced the winningest team in the NFL (Denver) over the last two seasons in the 2013 Super Bowl, they beat them by five touchdowns.
Was it a product of running the ball? Was it defense? Having the entire core of your team on rookie deals? Who could say? But Jim Harbaugh and Pete Carroll both seemed to be using the same recipe. It is tough to manage the timetable of a young roster, but it isn’t hard to decide what sort of team you are going to run.
The Dallas Cowboys, you should know, had run off a 24-24 record in the first three full seasons with Jason Garrett in charge. They also happened to be the polar opposite of what the Seahawks and 49ers believed, as they passed the ball with Tony Romo, Dez Bryant and Jason Witten generating most of the offense through the air. Only one team would actually pass the ball more than the Cowboys, who were 31st in run percentage (36.4 percent).
That team was Detroit — where Scott Linehan was the offensive coordinator from 2011-13. You will never believe who the Cowboys hired after 2013 to help their offense.
This is a copycat league, you know, and nobody was wanting to copy the 2011-13 Detroit Lions or Dallas Cowboys. Instead, Dallas spent time figuring out how to get from where they are to where Seattle is, essentially swiping the entire plan.
To the Cowboys’ credit, Garrett, Linehan and Bill Callahan went to work on an offensive philosophy that was designed to make Romo’s life easier by taking the offensive line built through the first round of the last four drafts and playing a more balanced structure of offense with some strong running. This made the QB as efficient as ever by throwing less, but we could quickly see that the last several years of “reckless abandon” offense from 2011-13 had taken their toll on his body. The front office had repeatedly whiffed in attempts to replace the defensive talent of the Parcells era by taking players like Bobby Carpenter (Parcells pick), Anthony Spencer, Mike Jenkins, Morris Claiborne and Bruce Carter, all with very high draft picks. They found few consistent starters among the group. Spencer was decent but probably not much above that line for long. Meanwhile, DeMarcus Ware, Terence Newman, Jay Ratliff and much of that defense had grown old. While that period of time had certainly found some decent players later on, the elite defense was no longer close to elite. They led the NFL in sacks (by a considerable margin) from 2007-2009, but they were now below average as the best players aged out.
The Cowboys wanted to be the Seattle Seahawks and very quickly began to do things like them on offense. They adopted the balance, the first-down runs and the QB who might only throw for 230 instead of 290 — but that is OK. Win the turnover battle and get off the field. Defensively, the premise would be to build around a base Cover 3 defense with big corners and fast linebackers. Some man coverages would be run, but almost never would we see blitzing from defensive backs. Heck, there would rarely be blitzing at all. The Cowboys would make it difficult to find big plays for the opposition and they would run the ball on offense. Their percentage of passing plays, once near 70 percent, got closer and closer to 50 percent. The Cowboys even swiped Kris Richard when Seattle was done with him. Who better to help understand the Legion of Boom than a coach who saw it all? They also were fixated on swiping Earl Thomas, too. But right before a 2018 trade could be finalized, he broke his leg.
It was global and complementary football. It made sense. Maybe the NFL didn’t know it, but Seattle was inspiring the Cowboys’ every move for the next half-decade. And from 2014-2018, the Cowboys won 50 games despite a 2015 season that was a total QB disaster. The only NFC team that won more over the same span was Seattle (55). That was better than everyone else in the NFC, however, even as they ushered in a rookie QB picked up with a 2016 fourth-round compensatory pick. That is beyond remarkable.
There are three problems with copying the Seahawks, however:
They had a young QB. Dallas started with one who needed a new body and whose career effectively ended in 2014.
They had dominant defensive players, and the Cowboys did not.
They had Pete Carroll, and the Cowboys had Jason Garrett. Aside from that 2014 win in Seattle, the Seahawks appeared to remain a better version of Dallas, winning head-to-head matchups three times straight until Dallas actually ended 2018 with a playoff win against those now-diminished Seahawks.
As this run extended from 2014-18, the Cowboys were on the right track. Then 2019 happened, and Dallas and Seattle parted ways on offense.
After five straight seasons of passing the ball for 250 yards or less per game, the Cowboys waved goodbye to Linehan, with the specter of Garrett’s potential ouster following them for the remainder of 2019. Kellen Moore was able to take some offensive control alongside Garrett, and Dallas comfortably exceeded 300 yards per game through the air with much more diverse and robust offensive ideas. They decided to invest in skill positions and an up-tempo attack that would try to maximize offense like the newest fads in the NFL overtook the Seahawks and 49ers. They were acclimating to a world where Sean Payton, Andy Reid, Sean McVay and their offensive machines were pulling away from prior teams that wanted to control the ball, clock and ground game. The pendulum of change was at it again.
Dallas cranked up its production to a league-high 431 yards per game on offense. It was really remarkable, and almost every offensive metric said the revolution had been pretty seamless — with the additions of Amari Cooper and Randall Cobb mitigating the decline and departure of the previous era’s cornerstones, Dez Bryant and Jason Witten.
There was just one significant problem: The defense did not change at all.
They still sat back in coverage. They still did not blitz. They still did not get turnovers. They still did not appear capable of turning a game, and they certainly weren’t winning a game for Dallas.
Remember that part about global, complementary football? It seems possible this might not live here anymore. In fact, the careful and cautious defense that was guarding against giving up big plays — the one that went along with the slow and methodical “control the clock” offense — didn’t change. It was as if the offense and the defense were playing two different styles in 2019. And it didn’t make any sense anymore.
If you have an up-tempo offense that can break the scoreboard and rack up huge gains, why aren’t you playing aggressive defense to attack and get the ball back? Why aren’t you forcing your opponents to get uncomfortable like they do in Baltimore and Kansas City? Attack with press-man coverage, safeties that play downhill and a heavy diet of blitzing.
What did Dallas do on defense in 2019 to take advantage of the most productive offense in football?
They played the 20th-most man coverage and blitzed the 26th-most. In doing so, they caused the 25th-most takeaways. There is not always a correlation between getting the ball back and playing more aggressively, but there usually is. Now, there is also a negative effect of playing aggressive defense and getting burned to give up big plays. But that is only a concern if you are poor offensively. If you can win in track meets, you don’t mind getting the ball back in most cases.
Do you see where this is going here?
There have been endless discussions this offseason about the merits of 4-3 front as opposed to a 3-4 front, and I haven’t bored you with that here because it doesn’t matter. The Cowboys will be in a 4-2 nickel (with the rest of the league) on at least 70 percent of snaps. The other 30 percent doesn’t interest me as much as the defensive disposition you pair with it. And now, through two months of defensive acquisitions, it seems clear that the passive, non-aggressive defense of Rod Marinelli and Kris Richard is gone. Four-man rushes are no longer the exclusive idea. Utilizing Cover 3 on every first and second down is not, either. They are going to force the opposition to deal with press-man-coverage, and the selections of Trevon Diggs and Reggie Robinson were the most obvious steps in that direction yet. They are going to blitz Jaylon Smith more often, and Jourdan Lewis will have a role, too. The defense has been designed precisely because the offense is so potent. They might have already believed this before CeeDee Lamb fell in their laps, but now I am convinced it is full steam ahead.
They are going to roll the dice because the offense says to do exactly that. And unlike the last few head coaches, this one seems to understand that you cannot run one side of the team without having a clue about the other. Winning teams play a style in which each side of the ball fits and complements the other. Like Bill Parcells, Mike McCarthy seems to pick the strength of your power unit (offense) and design the other side precisely to feed off of it.
That is why these early signs of a radical alteration to the defensive disposition seem intuitively smart. If you are going to play attacking offense, match it with attacking defense, and now you are pulling in the same direction. Heck, get a kicker who can make kicks (they have), and you might win two more games there alone. Plenty of things will need to fall into place — most significantly, having a 2020 season under any circumstances at all — but the idea of man-up defense, putting your corners on islands and occasionally send the house to push the opposition into uncomfortable spots might be something we haven’t seen since 2007 and 2009, when Wade Phillips attacked as Romo and his gang did, too. Those teams didn’t win the big prize, but they represented the last time this team attacked on both sides of the ball. Since then, they have either been conservatively careful or used mismatched approaches on offense and defense. It was as if the coaching staff was unaware of the entire concept.
McCarthy hasn’t won a thing in Dallas yet. This may not equate as easily as I am suggesting. But I think it has a real chance, and the optimism of seeing how they are selecting players has confirmed my thoughts from January might have legs. We will continue to follow this story, but so far, the developments are exciting.
Welcome back to common-sense football.
The Spring of 2014 was filled with a fair number of meetings and decisions in the Cowboys coaching room. In retrospect, that made a great deal of sense. It is clear that as Rod Marinelli was elevated and placed into power as the defensive coordinator after a horrific 2013 for the Monte Kiffin-led defense, the ideas behind the team’s defensive strategies would not be any sort of an independent effort anymore. There would be a global view of how the defense and the offense would complement each other.
Rumors slowly emerged that Dallas wanted to replicate the model the Seattle Seahawks used to win the 2013 Super Bowl and 24 regular-season games in their last two years with a team full of kids. They looked like the all-new power in the NFL, and they were doing it nearly from scratch. Their main rival appeared to be the San Francisco 49ers, who were largely doing the same thing with another group of kids. They had won 23 regular-season games in their last two years and had lost a Super Bowl. Those franchises were playing defense-first power football. The Seahawks were passing for the 26th-most yards in the NFL and the 49ers were passing for the 30th-most over those two years with QBs named Wilson and Kaepernick, who were both making no money on rookie contracts they signed after being selected outside the first round. But it was winning football because they could run the ball very well and the defenses were both Top 5.
The NFL had turned the corner. Maybe those teams with franchise QBs were not headed in the right direction. Over 2012 and 2013, the Seahawks and 49ers had won the most games in the NFC and had passed the ball less than anyone in the entire NFL. Technically, the Seahawks had passed less than the 49ers, but they were 31st and 32nd in passes thrown over two seasons where they had won a ton of games. Isn’t this interesting? Then, when they faced the winningest team in the NFL (Denver) over the last two seasons in the 2013 Super Bowl, they beat them by five touchdowns.
Was it a product of running the ball? Was it defense? Having the entire core of your team on rookie deals? Who could say? But Jim Harbaugh and Pete Carroll both seemed to be using the same recipe. It is tough to manage the timetable of a young roster, but it isn’t hard to decide what sort of team you are going to run.
The Dallas Cowboys, you should know, had run off a 24-24 record in the first three full seasons with Jason Garrett in charge. They also happened to be the polar opposite of what the Seahawks and 49ers believed, as they passed the ball with Tony Romo, Dez Bryant and Jason Witten generating most of the offense through the air. Only one team would actually pass the ball more than the Cowboys, who were 31st in run percentage (36.4 percent).
That team was Detroit — where Scott Linehan was the offensive coordinator from 2011-13. You will never believe who the Cowboys hired after 2013 to help their offense.
This is a copycat league, you know, and nobody was wanting to copy the 2011-13 Detroit Lions or Dallas Cowboys. Instead, Dallas spent time figuring out how to get from where they are to where Seattle is, essentially swiping the entire plan.
To the Cowboys’ credit, Garrett, Linehan and Bill Callahan went to work on an offensive philosophy that was designed to make Romo’s life easier by taking the offensive line built through the first round of the last four drafts and playing a more balanced structure of offense with some strong running. This made the QB as efficient as ever by throwing less, but we could quickly see that the last several years of “reckless abandon” offense from 2011-13 had taken their toll on his body. The front office had repeatedly whiffed in attempts to replace the defensive talent of the Parcells era by taking players like Bobby Carpenter (Parcells pick), Anthony Spencer, Mike Jenkins, Morris Claiborne and Bruce Carter, all with very high draft picks. They found few consistent starters among the group. Spencer was decent but probably not much above that line for long. Meanwhile, DeMarcus Ware, Terence Newman, Jay Ratliff and much of that defense had grown old. While that period of time had certainly found some decent players later on, the elite defense was no longer close to elite. They led the NFL in sacks (by a considerable margin) from 2007-2009, but they were now below average as the best players aged out.
The Cowboys wanted to be the Seattle Seahawks and very quickly began to do things like them on offense. They adopted the balance, the first-down runs and the QB who might only throw for 230 instead of 290 — but that is OK. Win the turnover battle and get off the field. Defensively, the premise would be to build around a base Cover 3 defense with big corners and fast linebackers. Some man coverages would be run, but almost never would we see blitzing from defensive backs. Heck, there would rarely be blitzing at all. The Cowboys would make it difficult to find big plays for the opposition and they would run the ball on offense. Their percentage of passing plays, once near 70 percent, got closer and closer to 50 percent. The Cowboys even swiped Kris Richard when Seattle was done with him. Who better to help understand the Legion of Boom than a coach who saw it all? They also were fixated on swiping Earl Thomas, too. But right before a 2018 trade could be finalized, he broke his leg.
It was global and complementary football. It made sense. Maybe the NFL didn’t know it, but Seattle was inspiring the Cowboys’ every move for the next half-decade. And from 2014-2018, the Cowboys won 50 games despite a 2015 season that was a total QB disaster. The only NFC team that won more over the same span was Seattle (55). That was better than everyone else in the NFC, however, even as they ushered in a rookie QB picked up with a 2016 fourth-round compensatory pick. That is beyond remarkable.
There are three problems with copying the Seahawks, however:
They had a young QB. Dallas started with one who needed a new body and whose career effectively ended in 2014.
They had dominant defensive players, and the Cowboys did not.
They had Pete Carroll, and the Cowboys had Jason Garrett. Aside from that 2014 win in Seattle, the Seahawks appeared to remain a better version of Dallas, winning head-to-head matchups three times straight until Dallas actually ended 2018 with a playoff win against those now-diminished Seahawks.
As this run extended from 2014-18, the Cowboys were on the right track. Then 2019 happened, and Dallas and Seattle parted ways on offense.
After five straight seasons of passing the ball for 250 yards or less per game, the Cowboys waved goodbye to Linehan, with the specter of Garrett’s potential ouster following them for the remainder of 2019. Kellen Moore was able to take some offensive control alongside Garrett, and Dallas comfortably exceeded 300 yards per game through the air with much more diverse and robust offensive ideas. They decided to invest in skill positions and an up-tempo attack that would try to maximize offense like the newest fads in the NFL overtook the Seahawks and 49ers. They were acclimating to a world where Sean Payton, Andy Reid, Sean McVay and their offensive machines were pulling away from prior teams that wanted to control the ball, clock and ground game. The pendulum of change was at it again.
Dallas cranked up its production to a league-high 431 yards per game on offense. It was really remarkable, and almost every offensive metric said the revolution had been pretty seamless — with the additions of Amari Cooper and Randall Cobb mitigating the decline and departure of the previous era’s cornerstones, Dez Bryant and Jason Witten.
There was just one significant problem: The defense did not change at all.
They still sat back in coverage. They still did not blitz. They still did not get turnovers. They still did not appear capable of turning a game, and they certainly weren’t winning a game for Dallas.
Remember that part about global, complementary football? It seems possible this might not live here anymore. In fact, the careful and cautious defense that was guarding against giving up big plays — the one that went along with the slow and methodical “control the clock” offense — didn’t change. It was as if the offense and the defense were playing two different styles in 2019. And it didn’t make any sense anymore.
If you have an up-tempo offense that can break the scoreboard and rack up huge gains, why aren’t you playing aggressive defense to attack and get the ball back? Why aren’t you forcing your opponents to get uncomfortable like they do in Baltimore and Kansas City? Attack with press-man coverage, safeties that play downhill and a heavy diet of blitzing.
What did Dallas do on defense in 2019 to take advantage of the most productive offense in football?
They played the 20th-most man coverage and blitzed the 26th-most. In doing so, they caused the 25th-most takeaways. There is not always a correlation between getting the ball back and playing more aggressively, but there usually is. Now, there is also a negative effect of playing aggressive defense and getting burned to give up big plays. But that is only a concern if you are poor offensively. If you can win in track meets, you don’t mind getting the ball back in most cases.
Do you see where this is going here?
There have been endless discussions this offseason about the merits of 4-3 front as opposed to a 3-4 front, and I haven’t bored you with that here because it doesn’t matter. The Cowboys will be in a 4-2 nickel (with the rest of the league) on at least 70 percent of snaps. The other 30 percent doesn’t interest me as much as the defensive disposition you pair with it. And now, through two months of defensive acquisitions, it seems clear that the passive, non-aggressive defense of Rod Marinelli and Kris Richard is gone. Four-man rushes are no longer the exclusive idea. Utilizing Cover 3 on every first and second down is not, either. They are going to force the opposition to deal with press-man-coverage, and the selections of Trevon Diggs and Reggie Robinson were the most obvious steps in that direction yet. They are going to blitz Jaylon Smith more often, and Jourdan Lewis will have a role, too. The defense has been designed precisely because the offense is so potent. They might have already believed this before CeeDee Lamb fell in their laps, but now I am convinced it is full steam ahead.
They are going to roll the dice because the offense says to do exactly that. And unlike the last few head coaches, this one seems to understand that you cannot run one side of the team without having a clue about the other. Winning teams play a style in which each side of the ball fits and complements the other. Like Bill Parcells, Mike McCarthy seems to pick the strength of your power unit (offense) and design the other side precisely to feed off of it.
That is why these early signs of a radical alteration to the defensive disposition seem intuitively smart. If you are going to play attacking offense, match it with attacking defense, and now you are pulling in the same direction. Heck, get a kicker who can make kicks (they have), and you might win two more games there alone. Plenty of things will need to fall into place — most significantly, having a 2020 season under any circumstances at all — but the idea of man-up defense, putting your corners on islands and occasionally send the house to push the opposition into uncomfortable spots might be something we haven’t seen since 2007 and 2009, when Wade Phillips attacked as Romo and his gang did, too. Those teams didn’t win the big prize, but they represented the last time this team attacked on both sides of the ball. Since then, they have either been conservatively careful or used mismatched approaches on offense and defense. It was as if the coaching staff was unaware of the entire concept.
McCarthy hasn’t won a thing in Dallas yet. This may not equate as easily as I am suggesting. But I think it has a real chance, and the optimism of seeing how they are selecting players has confirmed my thoughts from January might have legs. We will continue to follow this story, but so far, the developments are exciting.
Welcome back to common-sense football.
