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The Morning After: Cowboys outlast Lions with fourth-quarter fireworks
By Bob Sturm Oct 1, 2018
Noon starts in the NFL sometimes result in sleepy football early in the proceedings. That’s especially for teams that rarely play the early games. Sunday was no exception. The Cowboys and Lions traded punts until Dak Prescott started the fireworks with his second- and third-longest pass plays of the season midway through the first quarter.
First, it was the play-action bootleg drive-starter that they love so much (but to the right side instead of the left!) as Prescott found Geoff Swaim for a healthy 31 yards. Then, two plays later, they used play action on a second-and-short deep pass to Michael Gallup down the sideline for another 37 yards. These two passes, seemingly from Scott Linehan’s opening script again, showed the ability to execute on something the Cowboys haven’t done in the first month of the season — with the rare exception of the 64-yard touchdown to Tavon Austin in Week 2: find big plays through the air.
But as the day went on, the Cowboys offense resembled the recipe for success that we have seen more often than not since 2016 — although it has become a distant memory during this extended drought — when the “21-4” era began: a team that puts long, life-sucking drives together and racks up enough pounding and explosiveness from their star RB to allow some enticing opportunities to isolate cornerbacks on deep shots to vacant secondaries off play-action.
That was exactly what happened. Most importantly, when Dallas needed drives and points in the fourth quarter to try to hold off the hard-charging Matthew Stafford and an offensive group whose third-best WR might be better than anything the Cowboys can put out there, the Cowboys got it done with two key drives late. Again, this offense is far from fixed and the opponent and location of the game continue to really matter. But this is the 14th time in 36 games that the Cowboys offense has racked up 400 yards since the duo have taken over the two biggest spots on the offense. Perhaps, read that sentence again, this is the 14th time since the start of 2016 that the offense had a 400-yard day (in a league where 340-350 has been average for a while, 400 has been the benchmark for excellent games).
Context helps us absorb those numbers, right? Let’s do it. Do you know how many teams have more 400-yard days than the Cowboys offense since 2016?
Take a guess.
The answer is two. There are two offenses that have had more big offensive days than the Scott Linehan/Dak Prescott/Ezekiel Elliott Offense since the start of 2016. New Orleans has 18 and New England 15. There is the entire list. Atlanta and Pittsburgh join the Cowboys with 14 in a 3-way tie for 3rd place. Let that truth wash over you.
In other words, it has been a while since the Cowboys have done it consistently, but overall, the Cowboys have done very well in the Prescott/Elliott era. In the interest of revealing the “arbitrary sample sizes” that either support or defeat a thread of conversation, we should reveal that 9 of those 14 cases were in 2016 when everything made sense — including not giving Tony Romo the job back when he said he was ready and willing to take NFL collisions again. If you start in 2017 after teams have had a chance to study ways to slow down the runaway Dallas offense, the Cowboys only have five 400-yard days including yesterday. Over that span, the Rams, to the surprise of nobody, have 10 days to lead the league. Dallas has dropped back to the middle of the pack, they are right at the league average. When you look at the standings for 400-yard days since the start of 2017, you can find Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay at the very bottom of the list with Arizona, Cincinnati, and Miami managing one day apiece. Green Bay had that day yesterday against Buffalo.
In other words, 400-yard days do not grow on trees. But Dallas finished with 414 and Detroit made them gain every single one of them if they wished to leave with the far more important objective over any gaudy statistic; a vital victory.
When we see high-yardage days, we often think of the QB. That is how the narratives of the NFL are discussed and in many cases, it does ring true. But in the case of most of those days in Dallas – including the 26-24 win over Detroit yesterday, the big days in Dallas are often based around the one true superstar their offense boasts: Ezekiel Elliott.
Elliott has eclipsed 200-yards from scrimmage on three different afternoons. In fact, he has one in each of his three NFL seasons, with his signature day in Pittsburgh in 2016, his afternoon in San Francisco last year, and yesterday — which saw 240 yards from scrimmage — was his biggest day of them all. So before you suggest they should dial up yesterday’s recipe more often, you should know that he averages 130 yards from scrimmage per game for his career. When someone has a career day in any sport, we would request they do that every week. But even for someone with his immense abilities, it’s not easy to just break off 240.
To clarify that point, through a month of the regular season, there has been exactly one performance of over 200 yards from scrimmage in the NFL. It belongs to Ezekiel Elliott, Dallas, Sept. 30 vs Detroit. The previous biggest day in the league this year was courtesy of Christian McCaffrey against the Bengals with 194.
When you leave the house to go see a noon game from a team that desperately needed a win lest their season spiral out of control, you probably think it will be worth it because you get to see extraordinary athletes do extraordinary things. And yesterday delivered on that experience big-time.
What has allowed the extraordinary Stafford to throw for no fewer than 4,200 yards in a season since 2010? I think that was incredibly obvious yesterday as he put pass after pass on the money and made you feel like it is next to impossible to stop him. We knew that he would ask questions of the Cowboys secondary that they haven’t had to answer all season with downfield passes in high volume and now we know that the Cowboys secondary is still plenty vulnerable. Stafford threw for 300 yards, two touchdowns and a passer rating of 131, and he seldom missed all day. With a group that includes Golden Tate, who is incredibly difficult to corral, the game looked to be claimed by that Lions attack with 2 minutes to go. Stafford was excellent in just about every aspect of his game, save for allowing his team to fall behind because of a slow-ish start.
How about the extraordinary Demarcus Lawrence? He sits once again atop the NFL in sacks for the season and, for that matter, if you go back to the start of 2017, as well. Lawrence is a dominant rusher who may be called a “one-year wonder” by large parts of his own fan base, but you probably know where I come down on that. I believe he has been dominant since 2015 and that the Cowboys might wish they didn’t ask him to “prove it” again under the franchise tag this year. A long-term extension was going to hurt financially last spring, but now in a post-Khalil Mack/Aaron Donald contract era, the price has gone up and up and up. Especially if he can look down at guys like Mack and Von Miller in the all-important sack department and wonder what he might be worth on the open market in the spring of 2019 when he is still just 26 years old. After his three-sack performance yesterday, including a massive play late in the fourth quarter where he just destroyed highly-paid right tackle Ricky Wagner, the projections of his deal continue to go up and up. In other words, he is definitely proving it.
But there is no question that the most extraordinary of them all was young Zeke on this day. If you want to make someone a foundational piece of your franchise, you want to know a few things. You want to know that he can do things that very others can do, and every time he bursts through the line and into the secondary with conviction and purpose, you see that he has an uncommon skill set. But you also want to know it means a lot to him. This week, after being incredibly disappointing in Seattle (despite delightful statistics which distract some from the truth that he made way too many mistakes to win), you could tell he was determined to take that personally and to strike back with a vengeance against the next team in his path.
His biggest play this season before yesterday was a lost fumble after his 26-yard run in Seattle ended with disappointment. For emphasis, he put up his three biggest plays of the year yesterday, and the Cowboys needed each and every one of them.
The first was comically called “his pass play” because it seemed to be the only play in the passing game on which he has succeeded in his first three years. If you follow Decoding Linehan, you know which play we are talking about, but it is the jet sweep decoy to the left (Lucky Whitehead, Cole Beasley, Ryan Switzer, and Tavon Austin all have taken their turns) and then a throwback screen to the right where Elliott follows blockers down the right sideline and ultimately into the end zone. His biggest receptions of his career (until about 2:45 yesterday) have all come on this exact play. This went for a key touchdown with 1:39 in the first half that put the Cowboys ahead 13-10. His determination inside the 5 was his trademark strength and competitiveness on full display.
The second huge play was in the third quarter, starting a drive with 7:02 after a rare Lions punt. The Cowboys held a small lead, but after Elliott took a zone right for 41 yards, the field was flipped and the game was changed. That is the thing with Elliott, even in 13 personnel with the box loaded, he runs with such ferocity that a big man like Sylvester Williams can have a relatively free shot at him after he beat Connor Williams to the spot, and Elliott can leave him grasping air. Then he played off Joe Looney at the second level to avoid Jarrad Davis, and he was off to the races. Once Quandre Diggs was able to wrestle him down, he had run for 41 yards, flipped the field, and ultimately led to a touchdown. The football gods smiled on Elliott when he converted a fourth down, but lost the ball, and sometimes a day with no negatives only exists because Blake Jarwin was paying attention and recovered the ball. But, whether it was a 41-yard run or the fourth-down conversion, the Lions weren’t stopping Elliott yesterday.
But the third huge play was the one that really brought fans out of their seats. There was plenty of extraordinary skill on display yesterday, but with the Cowboys trailing 24-23 coming out of the two-minute warning, the offense had to march into reasonable field goal position. Who knew that the play which won the game would feature Elliott working from the slot? You see, if you study this offense, you know that the Cowboys have no real plan for Elliott as a receiver beyond the screen play and the occasional safety valve option in the flat with no forward momentum. He catches the ball either running towards the sideline or standing out wide, and you can count the substantive plays on one hand over three years.
The third play almost didn’t happen. Moments earlier, Dak Prescott showed his developing Football IQ when he threw a ball away to avoid a massive yardage loss on a near-sack fumble that would have ushered in a third and 25 if it went differently, but with the incompletion, they lined up for third and merely 3.
But, on that play, Elliott was out wide right in a stack and ran a half-hearted out to the sticks. Two plays later, he runs what appears to be a short option route, but again, he is not really running the route so if the Cowboys are playing the long-game to lull his man to sleep, they are really selling that Elliott is not in the plans as a receiver. Yet they keep lining him up out to the right as a wide receiver option in this all-important drive.
It’s second and 10 from the Dallas 41 with 1:23 to go and the game needs a play. Elliott is back in the right slot and the slant underneath takes the safety when Prescott looks him off. This leaves Elliott in man coverage versus the impressive linebacker Jarrad Davis yet again, but this time, Elliott runs a ‘go’ right past him. He doesn’t have a huge advantage, but he does have a step, which allows Prescott to nestle a great ball right on the money. Just like that, the Cowboys are in field goal range. This is a component of Elliott’s game that has seldom been explored. Teams will see this and realize that it is an option now that it cost Detroit the game.
Three huge plays — the biggest plays of his 2018 season — all in one afternoon, and after Brett Maher split the uprights from 38 yards, it was easy to see why Elliott has his reputation as one of the best backs in football.
Boy, did they need this win. But what makes it even better is that the Cowboys’ best players on each side of the ball played like their best players. That is how winning teams can keep winning. If Lawrence and Elliott can ball out like that, this team can get rolling in October.
By Bob Sturm Oct 1, 2018
Noon starts in the NFL sometimes result in sleepy football early in the proceedings. That’s especially for teams that rarely play the early games. Sunday was no exception. The Cowboys and Lions traded punts until Dak Prescott started the fireworks with his second- and third-longest pass plays of the season midway through the first quarter.
First, it was the play-action bootleg drive-starter that they love so much (but to the right side instead of the left!) as Prescott found Geoff Swaim for a healthy 31 yards. Then, two plays later, they used play action on a second-and-short deep pass to Michael Gallup down the sideline for another 37 yards. These two passes, seemingly from Scott Linehan’s opening script again, showed the ability to execute on something the Cowboys haven’t done in the first month of the season — with the rare exception of the 64-yard touchdown to Tavon Austin in Week 2: find big plays through the air.
But as the day went on, the Cowboys offense resembled the recipe for success that we have seen more often than not since 2016 — although it has become a distant memory during this extended drought — when the “21-4” era began: a team that puts long, life-sucking drives together and racks up enough pounding and explosiveness from their star RB to allow some enticing opportunities to isolate cornerbacks on deep shots to vacant secondaries off play-action.
That was exactly what happened. Most importantly, when Dallas needed drives and points in the fourth quarter to try to hold off the hard-charging Matthew Stafford and an offensive group whose third-best WR might be better than anything the Cowboys can put out there, the Cowboys got it done with two key drives late. Again, this offense is far from fixed and the opponent and location of the game continue to really matter. But this is the 14th time in 36 games that the Cowboys offense has racked up 400 yards since the duo have taken over the two biggest spots on the offense. Perhaps, read that sentence again, this is the 14th time since the start of 2016 that the offense had a 400-yard day (in a league where 340-350 has been average for a while, 400 has been the benchmark for excellent games).
Context helps us absorb those numbers, right? Let’s do it. Do you know how many teams have more 400-yard days than the Cowboys offense since 2016?
Take a guess.
The answer is two. There are two offenses that have had more big offensive days than the Scott Linehan/Dak Prescott/Ezekiel Elliott Offense since the start of 2016. New Orleans has 18 and New England 15. There is the entire list. Atlanta and Pittsburgh join the Cowboys with 14 in a 3-way tie for 3rd place. Let that truth wash over you.
In other words, it has been a while since the Cowboys have done it consistently, but overall, the Cowboys have done very well in the Prescott/Elliott era. In the interest of revealing the “arbitrary sample sizes” that either support or defeat a thread of conversation, we should reveal that 9 of those 14 cases were in 2016 when everything made sense — including not giving Tony Romo the job back when he said he was ready and willing to take NFL collisions again. If you start in 2017 after teams have had a chance to study ways to slow down the runaway Dallas offense, the Cowboys only have five 400-yard days including yesterday. Over that span, the Rams, to the surprise of nobody, have 10 days to lead the league. Dallas has dropped back to the middle of the pack, they are right at the league average. When you look at the standings for 400-yard days since the start of 2017, you can find Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay at the very bottom of the list with Arizona, Cincinnati, and Miami managing one day apiece. Green Bay had that day yesterday against Buffalo.
In other words, 400-yard days do not grow on trees. But Dallas finished with 414 and Detroit made them gain every single one of them if they wished to leave with the far more important objective over any gaudy statistic; a vital victory.
When we see high-yardage days, we often think of the QB. That is how the narratives of the NFL are discussed and in many cases, it does ring true. But in the case of most of those days in Dallas – including the 26-24 win over Detroit yesterday, the big days in Dallas are often based around the one true superstar their offense boasts: Ezekiel Elliott.
Elliott has eclipsed 200-yards from scrimmage on three different afternoons. In fact, he has one in each of his three NFL seasons, with his signature day in Pittsburgh in 2016, his afternoon in San Francisco last year, and yesterday — which saw 240 yards from scrimmage — was his biggest day of them all. So before you suggest they should dial up yesterday’s recipe more often, you should know that he averages 130 yards from scrimmage per game for his career. When someone has a career day in any sport, we would request they do that every week. But even for someone with his immense abilities, it’s not easy to just break off 240.
To clarify that point, through a month of the regular season, there has been exactly one performance of over 200 yards from scrimmage in the NFL. It belongs to Ezekiel Elliott, Dallas, Sept. 30 vs Detroit. The previous biggest day in the league this year was courtesy of Christian McCaffrey against the Bengals with 194.
When you leave the house to go see a noon game from a team that desperately needed a win lest their season spiral out of control, you probably think it will be worth it because you get to see extraordinary athletes do extraordinary things. And yesterday delivered on that experience big-time.
What has allowed the extraordinary Stafford to throw for no fewer than 4,200 yards in a season since 2010? I think that was incredibly obvious yesterday as he put pass after pass on the money and made you feel like it is next to impossible to stop him. We knew that he would ask questions of the Cowboys secondary that they haven’t had to answer all season with downfield passes in high volume and now we know that the Cowboys secondary is still plenty vulnerable. Stafford threw for 300 yards, two touchdowns and a passer rating of 131, and he seldom missed all day. With a group that includes Golden Tate, who is incredibly difficult to corral, the game looked to be claimed by that Lions attack with 2 minutes to go. Stafford was excellent in just about every aspect of his game, save for allowing his team to fall behind because of a slow-ish start.
How about the extraordinary Demarcus Lawrence? He sits once again atop the NFL in sacks for the season and, for that matter, if you go back to the start of 2017, as well. Lawrence is a dominant rusher who may be called a “one-year wonder” by large parts of his own fan base, but you probably know where I come down on that. I believe he has been dominant since 2015 and that the Cowboys might wish they didn’t ask him to “prove it” again under the franchise tag this year. A long-term extension was going to hurt financially last spring, but now in a post-Khalil Mack/Aaron Donald contract era, the price has gone up and up and up. Especially if he can look down at guys like Mack and Von Miller in the all-important sack department and wonder what he might be worth on the open market in the spring of 2019 when he is still just 26 years old. After his three-sack performance yesterday, including a massive play late in the fourth quarter where he just destroyed highly-paid right tackle Ricky Wagner, the projections of his deal continue to go up and up. In other words, he is definitely proving it.
But there is no question that the most extraordinary of them all was young Zeke on this day. If you want to make someone a foundational piece of your franchise, you want to know a few things. You want to know that he can do things that very others can do, and every time he bursts through the line and into the secondary with conviction and purpose, you see that he has an uncommon skill set. But you also want to know it means a lot to him. This week, after being incredibly disappointing in Seattle (despite delightful statistics which distract some from the truth that he made way too many mistakes to win), you could tell he was determined to take that personally and to strike back with a vengeance against the next team in his path.
His biggest play this season before yesterday was a lost fumble after his 26-yard run in Seattle ended with disappointment. For emphasis, he put up his three biggest plays of the year yesterday, and the Cowboys needed each and every one of them.
The first was comically called “his pass play” because it seemed to be the only play in the passing game on which he has succeeded in his first three years. If you follow Decoding Linehan, you know which play we are talking about, but it is the jet sweep decoy to the left (Lucky Whitehead, Cole Beasley, Ryan Switzer, and Tavon Austin all have taken their turns) and then a throwback screen to the right where Elliott follows blockers down the right sideline and ultimately into the end zone. His biggest receptions of his career (until about 2:45 yesterday) have all come on this exact play. This went for a key touchdown with 1:39 in the first half that put the Cowboys ahead 13-10. His determination inside the 5 was his trademark strength and competitiveness on full display.
The second huge play was in the third quarter, starting a drive with 7:02 after a rare Lions punt. The Cowboys held a small lead, but after Elliott took a zone right for 41 yards, the field was flipped and the game was changed. That is the thing with Elliott, even in 13 personnel with the box loaded, he runs with such ferocity that a big man like Sylvester Williams can have a relatively free shot at him after he beat Connor Williams to the spot, and Elliott can leave him grasping air. Then he played off Joe Looney at the second level to avoid Jarrad Davis, and he was off to the races. Once Quandre Diggs was able to wrestle him down, he had run for 41 yards, flipped the field, and ultimately led to a touchdown. The football gods smiled on Elliott when he converted a fourth down, but lost the ball, and sometimes a day with no negatives only exists because Blake Jarwin was paying attention and recovered the ball. But, whether it was a 41-yard run or the fourth-down conversion, the Lions weren’t stopping Elliott yesterday.
But the third huge play was the one that really brought fans out of their seats. There was plenty of extraordinary skill on display yesterday, but with the Cowboys trailing 24-23 coming out of the two-minute warning, the offense had to march into reasonable field goal position. Who knew that the play which won the game would feature Elliott working from the slot? You see, if you study this offense, you know that the Cowboys have no real plan for Elliott as a receiver beyond the screen play and the occasional safety valve option in the flat with no forward momentum. He catches the ball either running towards the sideline or standing out wide, and you can count the substantive plays on one hand over three years.
The third play almost didn’t happen. Moments earlier, Dak Prescott showed his developing Football IQ when he threw a ball away to avoid a massive yardage loss on a near-sack fumble that would have ushered in a third and 25 if it went differently, but with the incompletion, they lined up for third and merely 3.
But, on that play, Elliott was out wide right in a stack and ran a half-hearted out to the sticks. Two plays later, he runs what appears to be a short option route, but again, he is not really running the route so if the Cowboys are playing the long-game to lull his man to sleep, they are really selling that Elliott is not in the plans as a receiver. Yet they keep lining him up out to the right as a wide receiver option in this all-important drive.
It’s second and 10 from the Dallas 41 with 1:23 to go and the game needs a play. Elliott is back in the right slot and the slant underneath takes the safety when Prescott looks him off. This leaves Elliott in man coverage versus the impressive linebacker Jarrad Davis yet again, but this time, Elliott runs a ‘go’ right past him. He doesn’t have a huge advantage, but he does have a step, which allows Prescott to nestle a great ball right on the money. Just like that, the Cowboys are in field goal range. This is a component of Elliott’s game that has seldom been explored. Teams will see this and realize that it is an option now that it cost Detroit the game.
Three huge plays — the biggest plays of his 2018 season — all in one afternoon, and after Brett Maher split the uprights from 38 yards, it was easy to see why Elliott has his reputation as one of the best backs in football.
Boy, did they need this win. But what makes it even better is that the Cowboys’ best players on each side of the ball played like their best players. That is how winning teams can keep winning. If Lawrence and Elliott can ball out like that, this team can get rolling in October.
