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The Dallas coach overhauled his offense this summer to help with Dak Prescott’s interception issue. But that change is causing other problems—ones that don’t have an easy fix.
By Steven Ruiz Oct 12, 2023, 1:36pm EDT
Jerry Jones isn’t typically a source of optimism, but even after his team’s 42-10 loss to the 49ers on Sunday night, the Dallas Cowboys owner remained resolute in his belief that the team could win a Super Bowl. “One of the first things that I ask myself in any situation?” Jones said during his weekly appearance on Dallas sports radio. “Can we do some things different than we did against the 49ers? … Can we do something different? The answer is, Yes, we can.”
“Different” has been the goal in Dallas going back to the offseason, when offensive coordinator Kellen Moore departed the team and head coach Mike McCarthy took over play-calling duties. McCarthy installed what the team calls the “Texas Coast offense,” which may sound like a new creation but is really just the old West Coast offense, updated with a few modern bells and whistles—strong emphasis on the word “few.”
According to a preseason article from the team’s website, the foundation of the Texas Coast is a “combination of horizontal concepts that open up the opposing defense with tempo, pace and concepts that have worked for the team in years past.” In other words, Dallas is reemphasizing the short passing game, a marked shift from Moore’s scheme and something McCarthy and Co. decided to do primarily in reaction to Dak Prescott’s tie for the NFL lead in interceptions in 2022.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything so well covered about how deliberate we were to change some things,” Jones said of the offense after Dallas’s Week 2 win over the Jets. “We obviously went in a different direction relative to our play caller. … But to take what we were and then adjust to do some things that would really help Dak, you’ve got to go do that. You’ve got to technically step in there and do it.”
Prescott’s interception rate has dropped between 2022 and 2023—even after his three-pick performance against San Francisco—so the changes have led to the desired result. But the desired result hasn’t led to overall offensive improvement. While Dak’s interception numbers are down, so are the rest of his stats—including yards per attempt, expected points added per play, QBR, and success rate. The Cowboys offense ranks 19th in both offense and pass DVOA, and their only wins have come over Daniel Jones, Zach Wilson, and Mac Jones. And it’s not just the passing game, either. Dallas ranks 22nd in run DVOA, and Tony Pollard, finally out of Ezekiel Elliott’s shadow, is averaging minus-0.11 EPA per rush, 25th in the NFL, per TruMedia.
The offense is broken, and Dallas broke it by trying to fix an issue that, as we’ll get into later, wasn’t really an issue. So now McCarthy faces an even bigger repair job as he attempts to get the Cowboys back on track over the next few months. Jones is confident that he has the right coach in place—but what if the problem is the coach himself?
Before we dive into the issues plaguing McCarthy’s offense, let’s make one thing clear: Prescott is not a turnover-prone quarterback. He’s thrown an interception on 2 percent of his passes in his career. That’s the same number as Joe Burrow, and it’s just 0.2 percentage points behind Tom Brady’s and Patrick Mahomes’s career marks. In fact, there have been only eight quarterbacks throughout the history of the NFL who have done a better job at avoiding picks than Prescott.
So Dak’s interception problem wasn’t really a problem before last season, and you can make a compelling argument that it wasn’t even a problem then. Prescott’s interception total was inflated by poor luck. Per Pro Football Focus, Prescott’s turnover-worthy play rate, including fumbles and interceptable passes, ranked 13th in the NFL. The issue was that over 88 percent of his turnover-worthy plays actually turned into turnovers, compared to a league-average rate of 77.3 percent. And many of Prescott’s interceptions came on third-and-long situations, when quarterbacks tend to throw more picks because they’re trying to push the ball downfield. Dak turned up his aggressiveness in those obvious passing situations last season, and while it led to an uptick in mistakes—he averaged 8.3 picks per season before throwing 15 last year—that aggressiveness also often helped the Cowboys offense stay on the field.
It’s also worth pointing out that on the 96.2 percent of Dak’s dropbacks that didn’t end in an interception last season, he was pretty damn good. On plays without a turnover, Prescott ranked fourth in EPA per dropback behind only Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Tua Tagovailoa, per TruMedia.
With all that evidence, it seems like the Cowboys probably overreacted in completely overhauling a scheme that had otherwise been effective. Even if Moore, the team’s offensive coordinator from 2019 to 2022, and McCarthy did mutually agree to split, it would have probably been more rational to make subtle changes to the offense and just hope for a bit of regression toward the turnover mean.
Instead, McCarthy decided to start from scratch. He’s calling more passes on early downs this season, which analytics will tell you is a good thing. But not all passes are equally efficient. McCarthy is using a lot of “quick-game” calls, which aren’t nearly as productive as longer dropbacks—they’re mostly seen as an extension of the run game, and as with a run call, the primary goal is to pick up just enough yards to keep the offense ahead of the chains. But I’m not sure that’s how McCarthy views them. Based on his play-calling this year, he seems to think those short, largely inefficient throws are the foundation of his pass game: The Cowboys’ quick-game usage rate is double what it was last year, per PFF.
The increase in quick passes is largely responsible for the decline in Prescott’s production this season. On “run downs,” which TruMedia considers any play on first down or second-and-medium, Prescott is completing 70.9 percent of his passes with an “on-target throw” rate that ranks fifth best in the NFL. But he ranks just 20th in both yards and EPA per dropback on those plays, and 35.7 percent of his “run down” completions have lost EPA for the Cowboys, the fourth-highest mark in the league. Dak is executing the plays as they are designed; the play designs just aren’t very good.
In obvious passing situations, though, Prescott has been far more efficient. While he ranks 11th in EPA per dropback overall on pass plays, if you strip out play-action and screen passes, which are more dependent on play design than on a QB’s processing skills, he jumps to fifth, according to TruMedia. Dak is still the Dak of old; he’s just stuck in a poorly designed offense.
If the Cowboys are going to fix their offensive issues, they should focus on early downs, which is where we’ve seen the biggest change in play-calling. McCarthy has done away with all the wacky stuff Moore used to do, like funky backfield sets, six offensive linemen personnel groupings, pre-snap shifts and motion in the passing game, and overloaded formations that put three or four receivers to one side of the field. That means more static and symmetrical formations with half-field concepts to either side. It’s a generic-ass offense. It’s an NCAA Football 14–ass offense. It’s like someone searched “football play” on Getty Images and turned the results into a playbook.
I hate watching it, but I’m sure opposing defenders love it because it makes their jobs easier. All the complexity is stripped out of the scheme (by design, mind you), so it’s easier for defenses to sit on some of McCarthy’s favorite calls. For instance, Dallas has run a double slant concept 15 times this season—only the Bengals have run it more, per PFF. The Cowboys are averaging minus-0.40 EPA on those plays, and it’s because defenses know those routes are coming.
Here’s Dallas running the concept early in the 49ers game. Keep an eye on linebacker Dre Greenlaw, who recognizes the route combination and is almost too anxious to jump the slant route by the outside receiver.
Prescott notices Greenlaw and hits his checkdown option over the middle. But McCarthy goes back to the play later in the game. This time Oren Burks stays in place after the snap, waiting for Prescott to commit to a throw before the linebacker breaks on a route he knows is coming.
As Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner explained in a video analyzing those two plays, the depth of the routes also contributed to the failure of the plays—when they’re run at the same depth, the receivers are closer together and there’s less space to defend—so there are issues at both micro- and macro-levels with the scheme.
As the season continues and McCarthy continues to spam these short pass calls, defenses will sit on these poorly spaced underneath routes with even more confidence, knowing there’s very little threat that Dallas will beat them over the top. Per Next Gen Stats, Prescott has attempted only 13 passes of 10 air yards or more to the middle of the field. That ranks 27th among qualified starters. And even when Prescott has had access to the middle of the field—the most efficient area for pass attempts—his receivers have averaged only 2.0 yards of separation. Only Colts quarterbacks Anthony Richardson and Gardner Minshew have had to deal with tighter windows, per Next Gen Stats.
McCarthy just isn’t very good at unlocking those parts of the field through play design. The Cowboys have been one of the worst teams in the league on play-action this season, and Prescott is one of only three starters who has yet to hit on a deep crossing route (over 10 air yards), per TruMedia. The other two are Russell Wilson, who’s always had issues throwing over the middle, and Daniel Jones, who plays in an offense that has even more flaws than the Cowboys’. That’s a big change from last season, when Moore’s play designs helped Dak complete 12 of those passes on 20 attempts. The 25.4 EPA he generated on those attempts ranked fourth among passers in 2022, per TruMedia. Dak has attempted only one such pass this season.
It’s not just the crossing routes over the middle, either. Dallas receivers are finding it hard to create separation on all routes. According to PFF’s charting, the Cowboys have had the third-highest rate of pass plays where no receiver could get open, behind only Washington and Pittsburgh. Despite that, Prescott has still been above average in dropback efficiency.
This is where Dallas misses its old coordinator the most. McCarthy hasn’t been nearly as good at springing receivers open downfield, so Prescott’s really only throwing short, tightly contested passes underneath or deep shots down the sideline. If you’re a Packers fan who watched the end of McCarthy’s time in Green Bay, this all probably sounds familiar. A similarly flawed offensive setup in 2017 and 2018 had pundits wondering whether Aaron Rodgers’s days as an elite quarterback were done—and there was plenty of statistical evidence to support the claim. That poor all-around performance eventually got McCarthy fired in 2018, and he was replaced by Matt LaFleur, who installed an offense predicated on pre- and post-snap deception. Rodgers won back-to-back MVPs in 2020 and 2021 and silenced any talk of his demise.
Now Prescott is facing a similar situation. He can still be the same quarterback who helped Dallas lead the league in scoring just two years ago. But it’s up to McCarthy to let him be that guy—and that may require the veteran coach to abandon some of the core beliefs he’s held throughout his coaching career. That’s something good coaches do routinely.
But some—namely, Rodgers—have questioned whether McCarthy is capable of doing that. After McCarthy’s departure from Green Bay, it came out that Rodgers reportedly didn’t think too highly of his old coach’s football acumen. According to Bleacher Report’s Tyler Dunne, the Packers quarterback often complained that McCarthy called the wrong plays at the wrong time and with the wrong personnel, and, far too often, it was up to Rodgers to bail him out. “He’d say Mike has one of the lowest IQs, if not the lowest IQ, of any coach he’s ever had,” a source told Dunne in 2019.
That’s the coach Jerry Jones is leaning on to find a solution to the problems currently plaguing Dallas’s offense. The prescription seems clear: Get back to the offense the Cowboys ran last year. Don’t be afraid to get a little weird or to let Prescott push the ball downfield. Sure, there may be an uptick in mistakes, but there will also likely be an uptick in yards gained and points scored. Shouldn’t that be the goal?
