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By Bob Sturm May 18, 2021
We are in project/vacation season and this will carry us right up until California welcomes back those Dallas Cowboys campers (we hope).
Until then, I have been tasked to run through an inventory of ideas, and while some of these pieces will provide answers, others will simply present questions that are still developing.
So, when I am asked to break down what the defense is deciding to do and where it is deciding to go, I can give you vague thoughts about the career path and philosophies of Dan Quinn, offer thoughts on how he is regarded by those whose opinions should matter, and then try to make some semi-educated guesses.
First, here is what I wrote when Quinn was hired in January to provide the general takes when he was brought on board.
For the TL/DR crowd, here was my wrap-up:
Much of the negativity around hiring Dan Quinn focuses on his epic collapse in Super Bowl 51. Surely, the answer to fix this defense and to get the Cowboys going in the right direction cannot be someone who blew a Super Bowl lead to the Patriots. How could that be the answer?
My counter would be this: There is not a more qualified person to take over a defense that has lost its way than the guy who presided over defenses in three Super Bowls in four seasons. Are you kidding me? His defense was so fundamentally sound and capable of winning games that he went to three Super Bowls and only won one? And he is joining a head coach in McCarthy who went to only one Super Bowl but went to three other NFC championship games, too, and sometimes lost? Including the 2014 and 2016 NFC Championship Games, where he lost to Dan Quinn’s defense?
Do you know how good you have to be to fail in your third Super Bowl in four years?
It sounds to me like the Cowboys have two guys who know a little about winning on their coaching staff, and they have recently taken the spots of guys who did not know nearly as much. You can tell me that they needed incredible players to get there. I agree. Every coach does. Quinn and McCarthy do not have magic spells and enough sleight of hand to replace the talent deficiency this defense surely has. But you cannot add that in January. It arrives in the spring.
Well, the upgrades have started to arrive. They are a combination of old soldiers from the Falcons defenses and new troops fresh out of college. But, the talent infusion is underway and the pieces are being assembled.
The Cowboys like the work they have done this spring. That shouldn’t surprise us, of course. This is the time of year when 32 teams speak glowingly about their new team and faces and how this year might be the year. Optimism and hope spring eternal when there are no battles near. Everyone puts their best foot forward and the sky is the limit. Only when the hammer of reality starts swinging do we see dreams exposed as nightmares in the autumn and winter.
We have spent the last few weeks analyzing each new addition to the defense in depth, and that continues in a few days as I break down the pair of third-round defensive linemen that the Cowboys have brought in to quietly improve that group. There is no question what this team has to do personnel-wise, but today (and surely other times before Week 1), I think it is worth exploring the tactics and strategies that Quinn believes in and will bring to the table.
We all know he is a disciple of the Seattle Cover 3 peak days when the Seahawks had a chance for football immortality as a dynasty, but things turned upside down there pretty quickly. The history books get subjective pretty fast as to why these things happen and then disappear, but the salary cap and the inability to reproduce Earl Thomas over and over again in a copy machine are probably pretty far up the list.
By the way, does anyone else find it wild that for years the critics of Cover 3 would say that it won’t work elsewhere because Thomas was the secret sauce and now he is available and his phone doesn’t ring? The Cowboys absolutely wanted him and thought they had a deal in 2018 before his injury. When he went to Baltimore for a lot more money, he was off the board again. He was then released on Aug. 23 of last year and has been available since. And yet, this hasn’t even really been mentioned outside of fans online, and I really see no signs of it being revived (nor Richard Sherman or Gerald McCoy here, either). They want to start anew.
The general issues that many of us have with Cover 3 defenses in 2021 — almost a full decade later — in the NFL are as follows:
• The league had a massive reaction to Seattle’s dominance and, therefore, offensive minds spent years trying to devise a number of ways to defeat Cover 3. They did and now they are quite certain that they have the answers for how best to attack that coverage that in some ways is thought of as something the game has passed by. New Texas coach Steve Sarkisian had a recent online coaching clinic during which he basically explained how the attack works: “How many defensive coordinators in here, raise your hand? How often do you just call Cover 3 nowadays? I mean, it’s too easy. Because I can RPO you, your defender has to react and I’m gonna play catch every time. Every time.” That doesn’t mean that the Cover 3 defensive minds cannot counter with their own wrinkles, but the offensive guys are now openly mocking Cover 3. That is probably not a great sign. Cover 3 beaters (4 verticals, the over-route, etc.) are now a known thing by even fans and media, which is also not a great sign.
• The only time a team can run the basic “same scheme” and simply not care if you know is if it has unbelievable talent. You will recall the Cowboys offense in the early 1990s as an offense in which Troy Aikman could tell the defense what the play call was in the pre-snap cadence and it might not matter. There aren’t many teams that can do that, and I would suggest that Dallas is not silly enough to think the 2021 Cowboys have the talent level to slide into that rare category.
• The NFL has gone to a split-safety trend recently, often attributed to new Chargers coach Brandon Staley, but certainly we already have six to eight teams that are looking to run that Rams defense of 2020 wherever they go. This is all part of the recent proof that some defenses want to show you enough personnel high in the secondary that you feel forced to run the ball. Even the Cowboys ran 30 percent of their coverages last year with “two-high” schemes as opposed to the single-high looks of Rod Marinelli, Kris Richard and yes, Dan Quinn. Again, if they can pull it off, great. But, the whole reason the Cowboys are basically undergoing their third defensive remodel in four years is because they haven’t pulled it off.
Now, I also believe Quinn is a very smart man and a wonderful hire to get someone of his expertise to remodel this defense. I also believe that thanks to people like Nick Saban, the Cover 3 has evolved over the years and it would be foolish for us to assume that the 2021 Cowboys and the 2013 Seahawks are making the same calls. Also, we can see that they have targeted some special athletes who can carry out the orders much better than their predecessors. My biggest concern is that it often takes Jerry Jones and his crew a while to get an obsession out of their heads once it is in there. They seemed to be determined to rebuild the 1990s offense right up until the end of Jason Garrett. Now, they seem determined to model the 2013 Seahawks, even if the NFL has changed a ton since 2013 in many offensive scheme ways, and that train is not slowing down.
So, this piece is partly to show you the findings of my deep dive into Atlanta’s schematic choices from 2015 to 2019 (Quinn’s five full seasons as head coach) and then partly my concerns that this is the template for 2021 in Dallas. The concerns went first, but now allow me to take the remainder of this piece to give you a definitive look at the choices that were made over the five-year span for his defenses. Yes, I realize that some of these choices were made because of injuries and form. But, with broad strokes, here is what Quinn told us he is about from his days running his own show:
• The Falcons ran Cover 3 zone 47 percent of the time, then Cover 1 man 29 percent for a total of 76 percent of the coverages snaps over a five-year span. These are both “single-high” coverages and conversely, the split-field coverages totaled roughly 15 percent total.
• On first and second downs, Cover 3 was used 57 percent of the time and Cover 1 26 percent for a total of 83 percent. Split-field calls dropped to 10 percent.
• Third downs flip as we would expect. Cover 1 at 38 percent (man), Cover 3 34 percent (zone) and two-high man is 9 percent. So, again, every way you slice it, just like Dallas from 2017-18, we expect single-high and then man or zone on roughly four out of every five snaps.
• As we know, there is minimal blitzing in this scheme. In Atlanta, the Falcons were tied for 29th for the fewest blitzes (Bonus question: Who’d they tie? Dallas!) at about 22 percent blitz rate. Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas and the Chargers — all the Cover 3 teams — never blitz much. On third down, Atlanta was dead last on blitz rate over those five seasons. Like Marinelli and Richard in Dallas, the Cowboys were always well below NFL averages for blitzing, and it never really deviated.
• The corners did not travel much. In 2016 they did a bit, but the other four years, the Falcons never moved the corners from side to side for matchups. They ranked top five in the league at stationed corners.
• In 2016, they were the lightest box in the league and stayed there in 2017-18. That changed in 2019, but we assume that was when they were decimated with injuries so badly. They prefer barely six in the box at most times.
• And, yes, the Falcons were in base personnel roughly 22 percent of the time, meaning 78 percent was nickel or dime. As we can already see, they want speed and coverage on at all times to defend at their best — even though they were never an excellent defense — which again brings us back to the personnel.
So, that is what I found. Like I said, broad strokes for sure, but when we look at how they cover and whom the Cowboys are targeting, we begin to figure out what they are thinking. Much of it is guesswork until they learn what they can do. The other wild card is that there will be several players who have undefined positional ability, so Keanu Neal and even Micah Parsons will blur the lines on trying to sort personnel calls and quantification overall. (If you want to learn more about coverages, check out JT O’Sullivan’s YouTube channel, especially this video on identifying coverages and how to attack them.)
Hopefully, knowing some of this bigger information from his time in Atlanta will at least give us a starting point. They are not going to articulate much that is useful (nor should they) as this first offseason can work as an advantage if you don’t tell the world your plans.
