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Why the Cowboys fired Mike Nolan, challenges next defensive coordinator faces
By Bob Sturm 2h ago
So much of football is about zooming in on specific strengths and weaknesses and isolating them to diagnose a problem. Were this golf or even baseball, where things do often work in isolation, we would have much more success. But when we examine the 2020 Cowboys defense to seek specific reasons why the team suffered and the defense was often to blame, we come back with an overview that lacks real specifics. They were just really bad.
Well, OK. But where were they weakest? Who was bad? What specifically happened that caused that mess?
“Pretty much all of it,” he replied, trying to remain vague. Because the more specific you get, the trickier this becomes.
Dallas fired defensive coordinator Mike Nolan and defensive line coach Jim Tomsula on Friday in a “take out the trash” news dump before a playoff weekend that is probably one of their favorite tricks of the recent past. Late afternoon on a Friday before a playoff weekend avoids the main national sports news cycle for a team that normally enjoys attention, but this is starting to get too regularly scheduled.
End of 2016: Aside from an earlier-than-desired playoff exit, everyone did a fine job.
End of 2017: Defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli is not dismissed, but we are bringing in Kris Richard to “assist” him.
End of 2018: Offensive coordinator Scott Linehan is dismissed, Kellen Moore to replace him.
End of 2019: Head coach Jason Garrett is dismissed, Mike McCarthy is hired with nearly entire new staff.
End of 2020: Defensive coordinator Mike Nolan is dismissed.
You will know they have had a good season when the coaching staff is not asked to pay for the year’s shortcomings. This will certainly not be that year. The defense went from wanting to add some flavors to the vanilla conservatism of the Marinelli/Richard years where opponents were starting to mock the Cowboys for knowing what Dallas liked to do in every situation, to not being able to stop anyone at almost any point all year. The 2020 defensive group was very ugly. To review the notable dubious accomplishments of 2020 from last week’s finale that certainly sealed the fate of Mr. Nolan’s comeback as an NFL coordinator, here are the harsh facts, as presented last week:
I assume once someone reads that hit-list of footnotes, there is little question that the season was absolutely horrendous. And while there are certainly a number of factors to take in, the simple year-to-year comparisons between a 2019 campaign that caused the Cowboys front office to take the defense in a completely new direction and 2020, in which the new direction appeared even worse was clear. Take a look at the 10 major stats that we track and the Cowboys’ league-wide rankings (1 through 32):
As you can plainly see, they made a move to collect more takeaways. That is the holy grail pursued by teams who believe it is the final step to the throne. Unfortunately, despite a massive improvement in takeaways — suspiciously, nearly all in the second half of the season — the Cowboys saw every other category remain flat or drop substantially.
Chief amongst them would be an absurd inability to stop opponents on third downs after living off of that skill in 2019, as well as perhaps the worst run defense that we can ever recall seeing.
An honorable mention would go to points per game and yards per game, but those are a product of the total destruction of the entire operation. If you cannot stop the run or get off the field on third downs, points and yardage will soar.
The raw numbers move from year to year as the game evolves, but that is why we track league rankings. Without knowing where the league is, we fall into the trap of thinking the 1960 defense is a fair measure. It’s not. Nor is the 1992 defense. The league is unrecognizable from where it was in my youth, so let’s compare it to modern competition.
On the chart above, we saw that they were not in the top half of the league in eight of the 10 categories. The other two were passing yards and takeaways.
Even those two are somewhat misleading if you consider a team that’s generally trailing is unlikely to face the same volume of pass plays. Add to that the fact from last week, when we saw that they allowed a 100 passer rating over the full season. That schedule included two games against Daniel Jones and other matchups against Nick Mullens, Jalen Hurts, Kyle Allen and Brandon Allen.
Here is what really hurts: Only 10 QBs put up seasons with a passer rating over 100 this season. Ranked from highest to lowest, we have Aaron Rodgers, DeShaun Watson, Pat Mahomes, Josh Allen, Ryan Tannehill, Drew Brees, Russell Wilson, Kirk Cousins, Tom Brady and Derek Carr. Dallas only played Wilson (week 3) and Cousins (Week 11) this year. They claimed this dubious distinction without playing a single down against a top-five quarterback. In other words, they allowed QBs to do whatever they wanted this year despite playing a very soft schedule.
That would go for takeaways, too. If Dallas was able to find many takeaways this year, it might be for the same reason. If you want more takeaways, play fewer great QBs who don’t give the ball away. Four takeaways came against Mullens and Carson Wentz, while three-takeaway games came against Hurts and Allen. The other two multi-takeaway games were against Cousins and Daniel Jones.
Now let’s look at the evidence we have before us and try to figure out what they tried and how it might have gone wrong.
PRESSURE/BLITZING
One of the major beliefs going into the season was the 2020 coaching staff would bring more pressure and try to match the aggression of the defense to mirror what we assumed would be an aggressive offense. Dak Prescott going down for the year might have changed those ideas, but there was no sign in their game-by-game log that they did much differently after Week 6.
The fact is the Cowboys actually blitzed less often than they did with Rod Marinelli’s “never blitz” concepts. They were 24th in 2019 with a well-below-average 24 percent, and that dropped slightly to 27th in 2020. They didn’t believe they had the coverage behind the pressure packages, so they seldom brought them, although we did see some effective results when they sent Jourdan Lewis.
COVERAGES
We expected more aggressive coverages, and the reality is those never happened. The man coverage remained flat and in the bottom third of the league again. They don’t believe their corners can hold up in man coverage aside from Trevon Diggs, and he also had moments suggesting he has a ways to go and may only be a second corner on a contender. He is a very fine player, but this coaching staff seems to agree with the old staff that a team cannot be more aggressive with a group of linebackers and defensive backs who struggle in man coverage.
So what did the Cowboys run? Well, it is pretty clear that they decided Cover 3 was not a good idea. They went from second to 20th in the NFL in usage. In its place, they increased dramatically the two-high and split-field coverages, adding newcomers Cover 4 and Cover 6 to Cover 2 for almost 40 percent of the snaps on first and second down. That split-field coverage percentage is a huge increase because they were never in that spot in 2019, when they were barely at 10 percent.
Did they have a good safety? No. So they took two box safeties and had them play half the field instead of over-exposing one of them to single-high.
This must get addressed moving forward. I like Donovan Wilson and Xavier Woods to some degree, but they are both better down low. The run support was brutal from deep, and I think they might try to upgrade this position. Hopefully, they’re serious about the upgrade this time.
PERSONNEL AND HEALTH
That leads us to why this happened. There are disappointments every year in different parts of the roster, but the defense had their guys for the most part. On a team that was destroyed by injury, the defense lost Gerald McCoy in camp and Trysten Hill to an ACL tear in Week 5. That was pretty much the entire list of those lost to an unfortunate injury for the season.
We can still ask the questions about whether Nolan was let down by the front office — he probably was — but this defense performed even worse than the offense did, and that’s without losing four vital pieces for the year.
Where they really went wrong was believing a bargain-basement shopping spree in the spring of McCoy, Dontari Poe, Aldon Smith, Maurice Canady and HaHa Clinton-Dix could fix and address the scheme adjustments. Then, in August they grabbed Everson Griffin, probably when they realized Randy Gregory was not going to be quite ready at the start of the season.
Only McCoy required a substantial investment. Everyone else was on one-year deals, which normally tell us the Cowboys are taking flyers on pieces and hoping to strike some gold. We also know that is no way to find quality, which costs big money due to league-wide interest. Dallas had no resources to do that and therefore worked in the red-tag bins. That seldom is a good plan unless you are shopping for depth.
They gambled they could change the scheme. Then the pandemic hit, and most of their transition time disappeared. But the Cowboys already made their decisions and let people leave from the old look, bringing people in for the new one. They had set fire to their bridges and now were too far out to circle back. The bridges were gone.
This is a long way to say I feel badly for Mike Nolan because he never had a chance to get his group on the same page before the season was already a mess in Week 5. They needed the offense to carry them early and got nothing of the sort. The premise was that by Week 7, they would have Leighton Vander Esch back and Gregory added, and suddenly they would be able to finish the season strong. That made sense on Labor Day, but the foundation was destroyed before Halloween.
Jaylon Smith was a disaster, and Leighton Vander Esch played fewer snaps than Joe Thomas. They had nothing at DT, disappointment at LB and then retreads and chaos at safety. Do you think Mike Nolan had a plan that could overcome that? Nolan will get blamed for everything. As early as today, it appears they might hire Dan Quinn. We suspect Quinn will bring back a ton of what Marinelli and Richard were doing, since Richard learned from Quinn and Marinelli openly said they were modeling the Seattle defense. The trouble is that none of them — including Quinn in Atlanta — have the players Seattle did when they all were the rage.
And that is where we are yet again. The new guy will try to model the 2019 coaches, who we deemed at the time were not good enough, necessitating the 2020 year that was supposed to fix what is now declared broken. And yet the solution is to go back to what was originally thought to be bad. If this sounds like a lot of spinning in place and running to stand still, you are not alone.
The simple fact is you cannot win with the personnel that the team put out there at defensive tackle, linebacker and safety. You could probably add cornerback to the list, but again, nobody had to pass much against Dallas because they were always ahead and Dallas could not stop the run to save their life. Show me a coaching solution to that. I don’t believe there is one.
If you want Dan Quinn to have a better chance (if they actually are hiring him today), you had better fix those spots on your defense. There is so much work to be done, and in my opinion, it will start and end with the players on the field. Rod Marinelli, Kris Richard, Mike Nolan and Dan Quinn are four guys who know defense well and cannot win the Kentucky Derby on a donkey. They all need better horses to stand a chance.
By Bob Sturm 2h ago
So much of football is about zooming in on specific strengths and weaknesses and isolating them to diagnose a problem. Were this golf or even baseball, where things do often work in isolation, we would have much more success. But when we examine the 2020 Cowboys defense to seek specific reasons why the team suffered and the defense was often to blame, we come back with an overview that lacks real specifics. They were just really bad.
Well, OK. But where were they weakest? Who was bad? What specifically happened that caused that mess?
“Pretty much all of it,” he replied, trying to remain vague. Because the more specific you get, the trickier this becomes.
Dallas fired defensive coordinator Mike Nolan and defensive line coach Jim Tomsula on Friday in a “take out the trash” news dump before a playoff weekend that is probably one of their favorite tricks of the recent past. Late afternoon on a Friday before a playoff weekend avoids the main national sports news cycle for a team that normally enjoys attention, but this is starting to get too regularly scheduled.
End of 2016: Aside from an earlier-than-desired playoff exit, everyone did a fine job.
End of 2017: Defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli is not dismissed, but we are bringing in Kris Richard to “assist” him.
End of 2018: Offensive coordinator Scott Linehan is dismissed, Kellen Moore to replace him.
End of 2019: Head coach Jason Garrett is dismissed, Mike McCarthy is hired with nearly entire new staff.
End of 2020: Defensive coordinator Mike Nolan is dismissed.
You will know they have had a good season when the coaching staff is not asked to pay for the year’s shortcomings. This will certainly not be that year. The defense went from wanting to add some flavors to the vanilla conservatism of the Marinelli/Richard years where opponents were starting to mock the Cowboys for knowing what Dallas liked to do in every situation, to not being able to stop anyone at almost any point all year. The 2020 defensive group was very ugly. To review the notable dubious accomplishments of 2020 from last week’s finale that certainly sealed the fate of Mr. Nolan’s comeback as an NFL coordinator, here are the harsh facts, as presented last week:
I assume once someone reads that hit-list of footnotes, there is little question that the season was absolutely horrendous. And while there are certainly a number of factors to take in, the simple year-to-year comparisons between a 2019 campaign that caused the Cowboys front office to take the defense in a completely new direction and 2020, in which the new direction appeared even worse was clear. Take a look at the 10 major stats that we track and the Cowboys’ league-wide rankings (1 through 32):
As you can plainly see, they made a move to collect more takeaways. That is the holy grail pursued by teams who believe it is the final step to the throne. Unfortunately, despite a massive improvement in takeaways — suspiciously, nearly all in the second half of the season — the Cowboys saw every other category remain flat or drop substantially.
Chief amongst them would be an absurd inability to stop opponents on third downs after living off of that skill in 2019, as well as perhaps the worst run defense that we can ever recall seeing.
An honorable mention would go to points per game and yards per game, but those are a product of the total destruction of the entire operation. If you cannot stop the run or get off the field on third downs, points and yardage will soar.
The raw numbers move from year to year as the game evolves, but that is why we track league rankings. Without knowing where the league is, we fall into the trap of thinking the 1960 defense is a fair measure. It’s not. Nor is the 1992 defense. The league is unrecognizable from where it was in my youth, so let’s compare it to modern competition.
On the chart above, we saw that they were not in the top half of the league in eight of the 10 categories. The other two were passing yards and takeaways.
Even those two are somewhat misleading if you consider a team that’s generally trailing is unlikely to face the same volume of pass plays. Add to that the fact from last week, when we saw that they allowed a 100 passer rating over the full season. That schedule included two games against Daniel Jones and other matchups against Nick Mullens, Jalen Hurts, Kyle Allen and Brandon Allen.
Here is what really hurts: Only 10 QBs put up seasons with a passer rating over 100 this season. Ranked from highest to lowest, we have Aaron Rodgers, DeShaun Watson, Pat Mahomes, Josh Allen, Ryan Tannehill, Drew Brees, Russell Wilson, Kirk Cousins, Tom Brady and Derek Carr. Dallas only played Wilson (week 3) and Cousins (Week 11) this year. They claimed this dubious distinction without playing a single down against a top-five quarterback. In other words, they allowed QBs to do whatever they wanted this year despite playing a very soft schedule.
That would go for takeaways, too. If Dallas was able to find many takeaways this year, it might be for the same reason. If you want more takeaways, play fewer great QBs who don’t give the ball away. Four takeaways came against Mullens and Carson Wentz, while three-takeaway games came against Hurts and Allen. The other two multi-takeaway games were against Cousins and Daniel Jones.
Now let’s look at the evidence we have before us and try to figure out what they tried and how it might have gone wrong.
PRESSURE/BLITZING
One of the major beliefs going into the season was the 2020 coaching staff would bring more pressure and try to match the aggression of the defense to mirror what we assumed would be an aggressive offense. Dak Prescott going down for the year might have changed those ideas, but there was no sign in their game-by-game log that they did much differently after Week 6.
The fact is the Cowboys actually blitzed less often than they did with Rod Marinelli’s “never blitz” concepts. They were 24th in 2019 with a well-below-average 24 percent, and that dropped slightly to 27th in 2020. They didn’t believe they had the coverage behind the pressure packages, so they seldom brought them, although we did see some effective results when they sent Jourdan Lewis.
COVERAGES
We expected more aggressive coverages, and the reality is those never happened. The man coverage remained flat and in the bottom third of the league again. They don’t believe their corners can hold up in man coverage aside from Trevon Diggs, and he also had moments suggesting he has a ways to go and may only be a second corner on a contender. He is a very fine player, but this coaching staff seems to agree with the old staff that a team cannot be more aggressive with a group of linebackers and defensive backs who struggle in man coverage.
So what did the Cowboys run? Well, it is pretty clear that they decided Cover 3 was not a good idea. They went from second to 20th in the NFL in usage. In its place, they increased dramatically the two-high and split-field coverages, adding newcomers Cover 4 and Cover 6 to Cover 2 for almost 40 percent of the snaps on first and second down. That split-field coverage percentage is a huge increase because they were never in that spot in 2019, when they were barely at 10 percent.
Did they have a good safety? No. So they took two box safeties and had them play half the field instead of over-exposing one of them to single-high.
This must get addressed moving forward. I like Donovan Wilson and Xavier Woods to some degree, but they are both better down low. The run support was brutal from deep, and I think they might try to upgrade this position. Hopefully, they’re serious about the upgrade this time.
PERSONNEL AND HEALTH
That leads us to why this happened. There are disappointments every year in different parts of the roster, but the defense had their guys for the most part. On a team that was destroyed by injury, the defense lost Gerald McCoy in camp and Trysten Hill to an ACL tear in Week 5. That was pretty much the entire list of those lost to an unfortunate injury for the season.
We can still ask the questions about whether Nolan was let down by the front office — he probably was — but this defense performed even worse than the offense did, and that’s without losing four vital pieces for the year.
Where they really went wrong was believing a bargain-basement shopping spree in the spring of McCoy, Dontari Poe, Aldon Smith, Maurice Canady and HaHa Clinton-Dix could fix and address the scheme adjustments. Then, in August they grabbed Everson Griffin, probably when they realized Randy Gregory was not going to be quite ready at the start of the season.
Only McCoy required a substantial investment. Everyone else was on one-year deals, which normally tell us the Cowboys are taking flyers on pieces and hoping to strike some gold. We also know that is no way to find quality, which costs big money due to league-wide interest. Dallas had no resources to do that and therefore worked in the red-tag bins. That seldom is a good plan unless you are shopping for depth.
They gambled they could change the scheme. Then the pandemic hit, and most of their transition time disappeared. But the Cowboys already made their decisions and let people leave from the old look, bringing people in for the new one. They had set fire to their bridges and now were too far out to circle back. The bridges were gone.
This is a long way to say I feel badly for Mike Nolan because he never had a chance to get his group on the same page before the season was already a mess in Week 5. They needed the offense to carry them early and got nothing of the sort. The premise was that by Week 7, they would have Leighton Vander Esch back and Gregory added, and suddenly they would be able to finish the season strong. That made sense on Labor Day, but the foundation was destroyed before Halloween.
Jaylon Smith was a disaster, and Leighton Vander Esch played fewer snaps than Joe Thomas. They had nothing at DT, disappointment at LB and then retreads and chaos at safety. Do you think Mike Nolan had a plan that could overcome that? Nolan will get blamed for everything. As early as today, it appears they might hire Dan Quinn. We suspect Quinn will bring back a ton of what Marinelli and Richard were doing, since Richard learned from Quinn and Marinelli openly said they were modeling the Seattle defense. The trouble is that none of them — including Quinn in Atlanta — have the players Seattle did when they all were the rage.
And that is where we are yet again. The new guy will try to model the 2019 coaches, who we deemed at the time were not good enough, necessitating the 2020 year that was supposed to fix what is now declared broken. And yet the solution is to go back to what was originally thought to be bad. If this sounds like a lot of spinning in place and running to stand still, you are not alone.
The simple fact is you cannot win with the personnel that the team put out there at defensive tackle, linebacker and safety. You could probably add cornerback to the list, but again, nobody had to pass much against Dallas because they were always ahead and Dallas could not stop the run to save their life. Show me a coaching solution to that. I don’t believe there is one.
If you want Dan Quinn to have a better chance (if they actually are hiring him today), you had better fix those spots on your defense. There is so much work to be done, and in my opinion, it will start and end with the players on the field. Rod Marinelli, Kris Richard, Mike Nolan and Dan Quinn are four guys who know defense well and cannot win the Kentucky Derby on a donkey. They all need better horses to stand a chance.
