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By Bob Sturm
Sep 6, 2022
49
Welcome to the 2022 NFL season. We finally are here.
We are about 48 hours from another season blasting off as the Rams host the Bills in what should be a wonderful get-together.
And in five days’ time, the real bullets begin to fly for Cowboys football with Tampa Bay again, triggering opinions, conclusions and knee-jerking Mondays.
We love it and yet it doesn’t always help us understand what just occurred in its proper context.
That is why I started offering Tuesday morning analysis a long time ago. In fact, if you work your way through my personal blog archives, you can see that the first record of this is from September of 2008, when I started tracking information about the Cowboys’ offensive strategies. We tackled their personnel groupings, tendencies and philosophies — all in the name of learning about their intentions and how close they were to converting dreams into reality.
We have come a long way. Fifteen seasons later, I like the evolution of this system better, but just know that every Tuesday this fall we will be running the numbers in our latest season of “Decoding Kellen Moore.” On Wednesdays, we do the same thing with the defense in the form of the “Dan Quinn Report.”
Allow me to start this season as I do most of them — with a brief (by my standards) explanation of this whole operation.
What is Decoding all about?
We are trying to figure out the main objectives of the Dallas offense. We aim to identify its characteristics, strengths and weaknesses by tracking each snap in a number of different ways. The great thing about this sport is that due to the complexities and infinite combinations between personnel and play calls, there is no end to how many different ways an offense can attack its opponent. Many game plans are just for a certain week and that opponent. Others are seen every week against every opponent.
Tracking tendencies begins with identifying who is on the field. Of course, you must have 11 players, but which 11? We know that six players never change: the quarterback and the five offensive linemen. From there, we just have to note the other five players. The NFL has featured a numeric system for years; a two-number label for each personnel grouping of those other five players.
The first number indicates the total number of running backs. The second number is the total number of tight ends. There is no third number because it is just the difference between the first two numbers and the total of five.
For instance:
11 Personnel – 1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR
12 Personnel – 1 RB, 2 TE, 2 WR
13 Personnel – 1 RB, 3 TE, 1 WR
22 Personnel – 2 RB, 2 TE, 1 WR
Why do we care? Because the defense is reacting to the offense’s personnel with its own substitutes. If you put another tight end out there, they are going to try to match up with a different player to defend a second TE than they would smallish Tony Pollard. The same defender likely can’t hang with both. The defense knows how you like to do certain things, and it reacts accordingly. The offense then counterpunches, attempting to find more favorable situations.
Each personnel grouping should tell you something important and you, as a fan, can learn these and process them in real-time. It will unlock plenty about the chess game you are witnessing.
For instance, some teams — Arizona, in particular — employ 10 personnel (1 RB, 0 TE, 4 WR), because they know you will put a bunch of defensive backs (sometimes six) out there. That leaves only five defensive linemen or linebackers. With the defense spread out, those teams can then hand the ball off to their running back because they have five offensive linemen facing five big defenders, and that should give the running back lots of room to run away from defensive backs up the middle.
Conversely, you go big with 22 personnel — Baltimore loves to do this — which includes eight “bigs.” If the defense doesn’t respond with bigs, you run it. If they go big, you often have that last wide receiver matched up one-on-one for a play-action shot. And you also have more bigs trying to catch Lamar Jackson. Good luck there.
You make the defense choose what to defend, then you attempt to punish them for choosing wrong. This is the essence of offense — deceiving your intent and attacking weaknesses.
Below, we see how the Cowboys have chosen to do their business year by year over the five-year sample from 2017 to 2021. Of course, you will need to note that the league continues to shift as well.
Cowboys Offensive Personnel – ’17-21
| Season | Plays | 11-Per | 12-Per | 13-Per | 21-Per | 22-Per |
| 2021 | 1153 | 63% | 23% | 1% | 3% | 3% |
| 2020 | 1113 | 71% | 21% | 2% | 1% | 1% |
| 2019 | 1069 | 67% | 19% | 2% | 9% | 2% |
| 2018 | 1022 | 68% | 14% | 4% | 7% | 3% |
| 2017 | 1005 | 61% | 15% | 7% | 4% | 7% |
You see that 11 personnel is the coin of the realm in this league. I go over this almost every year, but the fact is that across football, this is what teams want to be great at in modern football. It fluctuates as teams figure out better ways to defend it, but just know that the object of the offensive side of the game is to create explosive plays as often as possible and to do that, you must get more explosive players on the field. Now, there are balances and counter-balances to everything that this game does, but know that we learned if we take a fullback off and replace him with someone who can play in the slot and run a sub 4.4, we will make more explosives. Sorry, Moose. It is just the way the game has evolved.
The Cowboys have evolved with it, but not at the same rate. When you rank teams across the league based on the belief that running the football is very important, Dallas will always be there. My theories on this have always been clear. The Jones family was raised in the NFL on the early 1990s Cowboys dynasty and that team ran the ball as well as any team in that era, of course, with Emmitt Smith running through the record books in short order. We know that they destroyed the NFL with the ability to build everything around a physical and dominant run game. They won and won with that style, so you can imagine that winning and running can be interchangeable terms in their heads. Who can blame them?
That explains the resources pushed into the run game and the frustration when it doesn’t seem to work. That will explain the appeal of Mike McCarthy to the Cowboys ethos who despite having Aaron Rodgers all of those years, never left the objectives of running the ball, being physical and resisting 11 personnel as much as possible to set up a balanced offense.
This franchise, to this very minute, believes running the ball will unlock everything on its path to the Super Bowl. It is why they drafted Ezekiel Elliott and still believe in him seven seasons later. It is why they believe in Tyler Smith and Terence Steele who are definitely better at run blocking than pass protecting. It is why they believe in 12 personnel and signed Jason Peters. And it is why they don’t really worry about who their third wide receiver is anymore. They believe that their third receiver shouldn’t play very much if things are going well.
Consider 2021, if you want to get in their heads a bit. We look back at 2021 as the tale of two seasons. In the early going, everything was great and Dallas was dominant on offense. It was a thing of beauty and they were able to be at or above the entire league in so many offensive categories. The season changed on a dime around Week 8. We just aren’t sure which dime it was, but take a look at what happened after the win at Minnesota to the personnel usage.
Cowboys Offensive Personnel – 2021
| SEASON | OFF PLAYS | 11-PER | 12-PER | 13-PER | 21-PER | 22-PER |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 Wks 1-8 | 488 | 54% | 30% | 1% | 4% | 2% |
| 2021 Wks 9-18 | 665 | 69% | 17% | 1% | 1% | 3% |
We see in the blue what they started the season hoping to do — plenty of two tight ends with Dalton Schultz and Blake Jarwin — and then leaving Minnesota, they lost Jarwin to injury (and his career ended). Since then, the Cowboys were unable to get that part of their offense back and we haven’t talked enough about it.
So, while everyone discussed at great length the calf injury of Dak Prescott and all the effects that resulted from this: Prescott staying in the pocket and not using his legs to make plays, defenses not blitzing as much, defenses playing more zones, Dallas being unable to run the ball on early downs and Dallas being unable to find explosive plays. Perhaps what we missed was that the Cowboys lost a large part of their playbook which was to stay in a 12 personnel base offense on early downs and had to lose all of that because Jarwin did not return.
Why do teams play so much 12 personnel? Because it is the most balanced attack. It requires defenses to have enough “big” in the game to deal with seven run blockers but it also has the ability to pass out of it all day if you go too big on defense. It chases teams out of nickel and can control the clock. My issue with it is that it also seems to lower the amount of big plays unless one or both of your tight ends can manufacture big plays. But, again, I am not the coach or offensive architect. I have my goals and they have theirs.
But, what we cannot argue about, is the following chart. Look how the Cowboys’ production fell off after leaving Minnesota.
2021 Ranks Before/After Week 8
| WKS 1-8 | WKS 9-18 | |
|---|---|---|
| Yds/Play | 6.52 (2nd) | 5.62 (12th) |
| EPA/Play | 0.14 (4th) | 0.09 (9th) |
| YPA | 8.51 (6th) | 7.12 (11th) |
| Yd/Rush | 4.88 (5th) | 4.14 (22nd) |
| Rush/Gm | 31.1 (4th) | 25.5 (22nd) |
| 1D/Rush | 25.2 (15th) | 22 (26th) |
| Design Pass | 58.2 (27th) | 65 (5th) |
| Design Runs | 41.8 (6th) | 35 (28th) |
| Psr Rating | 112.1 (3rd) | 99.9 (6th) |
| 3rd Downs | 47.2 (4th) | 41 (17th) |
Isn’t that shocking? Look at all of that. In every single category, the Cowboys got worse. In a nutshell, that graphic is why this coaching staff decided to sort of spend its offseason trying to reorganize what they were doing early in the 2021 season.
Yes, it is about Prescott, but they want it “in balance” which simply means that they believe the key to everything is to be a strong running team. As I continue to say year after year, using the recipe for the 1992 Cowboys to apply to the NFL in 2022 is dangerous territory when we consider that very little from the game is the same, but I am convinced that this explains a lot. This explains the offensive line decisions, the Amari Cooper decision, the Schultz franchise tag, and yes, this might explain why rookie TE Jake Ferguson is going to play a lot more than people think. Jarwin played 37 snaps a game in those first seven games and Schultz played 56. I would be willing to bet that we should look for 36 or so 12 personnel snaps a game from the Cowboys early in the season.
In other words, who is your third receiver early on and why didn’t Dallas go chasing a veteran WR in the spring or summer knowing that Michael Gallup might rejoin CeeDee Lamb very quickly? I am convinced the Cowboys are thinking the answer is Ferguson as a second tight end.
As far as the big plays go, even with all of the more 12 personnel in the early part of the season, Dallas dropped from fifth to 22nd in explosive-play percentage after Week 8. Somehow the Cowboys played much more 11 personnel with three weapons on the field and saw their explosiveness drop substantially. Very irritating.
We can look at different samples to make ourselves feel better or worse. For instance, compare the 2021 season in halves and you feel poorly. But, compare 2021 as a whole to 2020 and you feel better!
Just look at these league rankings in our 10 big categories:
Again, it is all perspective. The 2021 offense was quite good. Just not close to good enough when it mattered most. We cannot lose sight of the forest because of the trees here. Across the board this offense gets it done, which is why slander of Prescott, Moore, and yes, even McCarthy is not always tolerated around here. We have to realize that the expectations are sky high. We also have to realize that when we are acting like the sky is falling, it is generally 25 years of angst and forgetting how awful 2020 truly was without Prescott.
It can always get much worse.
The object of the game here on Tuesdays will be to see how the Cowboys built their game plan, what worked and what did not from those objectives. We will make our observations and hopefully, we will all learn a little more as we go through this thing. We will also try not to leave any newbies behind, nor are we claiming that we have all the right answers. We are pursuing them, but we certainly don’t claim to know it all. Just trying.
For now, here is the ourlads.com depth chart for the Cowboys offense. Keep in mind that the practice squad rules mean this is far from final and they will likely have a new left tackle very soon.
With this group in mind, some obvious objectives before we go for Kellen Moore (and us) to track:
• How well can this offense produce without Amari Cooper? 2017-18 was unpleasant between Dez Bryant and Cooper.
• How well can this offensive line hold its own? Pass protection should be a big concern until proven otherwise.
• How well can this team — specifically Elliott — run the ball on first-and-10? They were 31st in yards/rush after Week 8 last year on first down … 31st! Only the Houston Texans were worse in the entire league.
• Can the team find Lamb?
• Can play-action be a bigger part of the attack?
• Is there a way to properly involve Pollard? And if so, what about KaVontae Turpin?
• How long until Peters is in at left tackle? Because signing him should calm everything down a good bit.
• Where will this offense find its explosiveness?
• Can more be placed on Prescott to come up with solutions on the fly?
• Has the team learned how to attack zone defenses better with route combinations that stress them and put defenders in conflicts?
• What will be the best way to consistently convert third downs?
There is no easing into this. Tampa Bay and Cincinnati are two home games in which Dallas will be tested by a team that plans to be playing deep into January. They are also both in Dallas meaning they are not games where you will feel great about fighting hard in a loss. You will want to make sure you get at least one and preferably both.
Each Tuesday, we will grade everything as best we can on all of these fronts. We hope you will join us.
