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By Bob Sturm
5h ago
Let’s begin our next phase of the year with a step into our “educational and informational” time of year.
You see, if you are in the football world, you are either in the personnel business, the playing business or the rest of us. And each of those three groups have a different agenda from late May until training camp.
Let’s briefly break it down:
1. Personnel departments (scouts, etc.): Once OTAs start, you are doing two things depending on your specific duty. Either you are in pro personnel or college. If you are in the college group, it is easy. Start all over. You just cleaned out your 2023 filing cabinet, and now, without delay, you proceed to your next 1,000 potential draft candidates for next year. If you ever have known a scout, you know they are tireless and diligent. The work never stops. If you are on the pro side, you are already working on other teams’ rosters — specifically the knowledge of the 90-man rosters and who is unlikely to make the cut to 53 with their current teams. Every department will make a specific list of guys they might have missed out on, that they will closely monitor for every position on the roster. You can bet that they have a list a few feet long with potential kickers, for instance. The pro scouting side should be able to tell you a story about the other 31 teams’ roster situations or they are not doing their job very well.
https://theathletic.com/4545006/2023/05/25/cowboys-tyron-smith-offensive-line/
2. Players and coaches: You know about OTAs and the installation of the offense, defense and special teams that teams want completed before training camp. All the Cowboys want to have to do in California is a quick review before you hit the ground running with a full training camp in late July, so they have a bit more work to do on campus between now and then. From there, the coaches take some family time (not too much!) and put the finishing touches on the full camp plan as well as side projects (we assume how to deal with the Eagles’ running game will be well up the list). The players finish this job and then get time to either find a beach or keep working to improve with their personal coaches and plans. There is not much time to take off if you are serious about your craft at this level.
3. The rest of us: Two subsets in this group — normies and sickos. Choose which side you are on, but if you are normal, you enjoy baseball, family, sunshine, golf or maybe a book. Football season is coming and this is definitely the “down time.” Drink it all up. I am definitely always excited about two purposes for my NFL work (although I do make time for golf):
• To continue on projects I have meant to do this offseason, but have yet to actually knock out. One was last week’s Tyron Smith piece, but there are plenty more coming including ones on Brandin Cooks, Trevon Diggs, Tyler Smith and Micah Parsons. Plenty of those items coming.
• The next eight weeks are my annual educational and informational phases which will be reflected in my writing. Since 2005, I use June and July to ramp up my education in this great game. I pick different activities that I want to learn more about and read and consume as much as I can. This summer’s projects are going to start with a full education of the running game (some I am familiar with and some I don’t know much about) and also an examination of Dak Prescott’s QB play at Mississippi State in 2014-15 (How was he used as a player? What did he do well? What does he do differently in 2023 that he didn’t do in 2015?). I have plenty on my plate that you will see here.
Since we are riffing today, I want to dive more into that Cowboys running game exploration project. Over the course of upcoming weeks, we will do plenty more of the X’s and O’s involved.
https://theathletic.com/4540821/2023/05/23/cowboys-offense-brian-schottenheimer/
An examination of the Cowboys’ running game
To know what we are studying, it is always important to compare with the rest of the sport. The example I would use is some basic baseball stats. If you tell someone on the street who doesn’t know the game that this guy gets a hit 3 of every 10 chances, that person would assume he is not very good at getting hits (unless they understood the context and difficulty of baseball). Another example is a bad offensive lineman only gives up two sacks in 60 plays. He is successful 58 of the 60 plays or 97 percent of the time. Yet, he is not capable of playing at this level. These two examples show us that context is everything.
With that in mind, the Cowboys called the second-most run plays in 2022 in the NFL behind only Atlanta. That is different than total runs, because many teams run either/or plays (run-pass options or even scrambles from pass calls) that add to their total. From that standpoint, Dallas had the sixth-most runs. Either way, they Cowboys are really heavy into their run game.
As you see below, the green line represents the entire league’s average runs per game over a five-year trend. It keeps rising year over year (we believe it is the RPO world we live in). Obviously, it is cyclical, but the NFL is in a running phase (relatively). The blue line shows the Cowboys’ five-year trend. They have been headed north of the NFL line for a long time, but 2022 was remarkable. They went way above league average.
Thirty-one runs per game! Here is what is interesting. You might be thinking the Cowboys ran the ball a ton when Cooper Rush was filling in for Prescott to protect a backup QB. That is sort of correct. But check this out:
Games started by Rush rushes per game: 29.2 (49.3 percent of plays)
Games started by Prescott rushes per game: 31.6 (44.4 percent of plays)
The Cowboys ran the ball less with Rush, but proportionally more and ran it more with Prescott, but proportionally less. I know, I know.
Here is where you can really see it. With Rush, on first down, the Cowboys ran the ball 62.1 percent of the time, which is way above the NFL average rush on first down (51 percent). With Prescott, the Cowboys were still well above of the league at greater than 55 percent.
Now, due to advances in the way we cover the NFL, we know the concepts that each team loves to run and have specifics on those stats. Both Pro Football Focus and NFL’s Next Gen have assisted us in better understanding this. Over the course of the upcoming weeks, I will dive into the most common run concepts the Cowboys have used, but also I admit that we don’t fully know how that will change in 2023 with a largely new offensive coaching staff.
But, before we do that, we should spend our remaining time on the most important takeaway. In the last few years, we know two conflicting truths: Dallas loves running the ball, but is bad at running the ball. Let’s examine that.
There are two reasonable ways to measure an overall running game. Total EPA and Success Rate. The NFL had the same leaderboard in both categories last year and I bet you would concur it meets the eye test, too.
https://theathletic.com/4553815/2023/05/26/cowboys-otas-offense-dak-prescott/
In both categories, those three teams were the best in the business at running the football. We know the Eagles were the best all year and it got them very close to winning a Super Bowl. Baltimore has been a leader for years at creative and effective ways to run the rock and Atlanta has Arthur Smith (and now, Bijan Robinson) so they know what’s up.
But, the Cowboys?
We told you how much they love running the ball. They called more running plays than 30 teams (trailing only Atlanta). How did they perform? Well, 10th in EPA and 21st in Success Rate.
It gets worse.
We told you how much the Cowboys love running the ball on first down. The league runs the ball 51.4 percent of the time on first down and Dallas is more than 57 percent. Surely, that is because it is good at it, right?
No. Dallas is 27th in total EPA on first-down runs and 25th in Success Rate. Our friends in Philadelphia were third in EPA and No. 1 in Success Rate on first down.
Why? What caused the Cowboys to be so bad at that? And worse, what caused them to be so stubborn, despite knowing how bad they were at it?
From Nov. 1, as the season was weighing in the balance, the Cowboys’ first-down run rankings in those two important categories were a ridiculous 30th and 29th. The only teams worse at running the ball? Tampa Bay, Tennessee and Houston.
Gross. And now you know why Dallas pretty much fired the entire offensive staff.
Next time, let’s look at what plays Dallas liked to call and which ones worked.
