Sizing Up the Dallas Cowboys

Last night, I hunkered down in the film room (read: NFL Game Rewind) and watched the last two games of the Eagles’ week eight opponent, the hated Dallas Cowboys. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. The team is 3-3, including three fourth quarter letdowns. Most of the press I’ve stumbled across about the division rival has been disparaging at best.

But I came away from those two games and an examination of the stats with an entirely different perspective: the Cowboys are a pretty good team.

Let me start with the objective stats from Football Outsiders. Dallas excels in a number of areas. They are third overall in team defense, and first in adjusted line yards allowed by the front seven. On offense, they’re only 30th rushing the ball, but are eighth though the air. Having the fifth-best adjusted sack rate helps, as does Tony Romo’s overall stellar play. He has had some untimely interceptions in losses to the Lions and Jets, but he’s still fourth in quarterback DVOA, the highest rate of his career. Romo’s yards per attempt and QB rating are right in line with where they were before his injury-shortened season in 2010.

Subjectively, the Cowboys looked very solid against both the Patriots and Rams in the last two weeks. St. Louis was a pushover, with A.J. Feeley starting and basically no one interested in tackling, but Dallas didn’t mess around. They had few mistakes, racked up the yards, and got a breakout rushing game for the first time this year. Dallas also played an even, closely-fought game against New England that Tom Brady pulled out with a last minute touchdown drive.

Andy Reid always wins after the bye. Always. 15-0 including in the playoffs. But this one won’t be easy. The Cowboys have all the weapons to beat the Eagles this Sunday: a solid quarterback, playmakers at wide receiver, tight end, and out of the backfield. They have a physical, blitz-happy defense.

Most games from here on out are “must win” situations for the Eagles, because they can’t afford more than two additional losses if they still want a real shot at making the playoffs. This one is more of a “show me” game. If the team really wants to give me hope that they can pull off a turnaround, a solid game against a good team like the Cowboys is where they need to start.

Photo from Getty

Friday Figures: Blitzing Tony Romo (or Not)

Just a quick stats post here for people to ruminate on over the weekend, before I hit you with some big news on Monday…

Today over at Iggles Blog, Derek has an insightful breakdown of the situational blitzing differences between the late Jim Johnson and rookie defensive coordinator Sean McDermott. His analysis led me to look back over the two sample game charts Football Outsiders released: the first halves of the two 2009 regular season Eagles-Cowboys games.

First of all, let me just throw up the numbers for all of last year’s blitzing on the right. Overall, McDermott seems to have brought a few more blitzers on third down than JJ, but other than that the defensive playcalling was fairly consistent from 2008.

But were the game plans for the Cowboys games very different? Absolutely. In fact, the two were completely opposite. Here they are.

On top you can see the differences in percentage from the season average for the first game. In this one the Eagles blitzed constantly, sending five, six, and seven guys after the quarterback way more than average. In fact, only on first down did McDermott blitz less than half the time.

Then a complete reversal for week seventeen. In every area where the defense had blitzed more than average in the first game, they did the opposite for the second meeting. Compared to 16 blitzes in the first half of week nine, come January the Eagles only blitzed four times! Perhaps the Eagles coaching staff thought that they had failed with the blitz in the first matchup, or they believed a coverage-based approach would surprise Dallas. Either way, the about-face is startling.

Of course, we know that this change didn’t work too well. Which leads us to the final charts of the evening (at right), which shows the  effectiveness of the two game plans. I’m not sure that this can be extrapolated out for more than this particular case, but here the results suggest one thing.

Blitzing when the Cowboys didn’t expect it, i.e. on first and second down, was fairly successful. Outside of one long second down pass, the Eagles stifled Tony Romo with the blitz. But on third down, the roles were reversed. At least in these two halves, dropping players back into coverage was slightly more effective than blitzing.