Cowboys: The good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2023 season at the bye
Well, the Dallas Cowboys don't have a game this weekend so, what better time to review the season that has been up until now? Call it the bye-week review. The Cowboys are 4-2 and Jerry Jones recently said he wouldn't want to start over the season. They like where they are. But that doesn't mean […]
Well, the Dallas Cowboys don't have a game this weekend so, what better time to review the season that has been up until now? Call it the bye-week review.
The Cowboys are 4-2 and Jerry Jones recently said he wouldn't want to start over the season. They like where they are.
But that doesn't mean the good has come with some negative. Today, we dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of the early part of the 2023 Cowboys.
The Good: Defense is still legit
The San Francisco game is difficult to erase from our memories but the Cowboys defense has been objectively good. They're not allowing a whole lot of red zone trips and are still finding ways to take the football away. Per Pro Football Reference, they rank as follows:
- 3rd best in drives ending in a score (%)
- 4th best in drives ending in a turnover (%)
- 4th best in red zone opportunities allowed per game
While the pass rush as a whole ranks lower than we would've expected entering Week 7, Micah Parsons is still playing like a top Defensive Player of the Year candidate. Just in their last game, they pressured Justin Herbert at the highest rate the Chargers have allowed all season.
On the defensive backfield, DaRon Bland keeps playing like one of the best cover cornerbacks in the league and this unit is doing well even without Trevon Diggs. They could use some depth, but their starting lineup works.
The Bad: Penalties, 46 of them
The Cowboys are tied for the highest amount of penalties this season at 46, per The Football Database. And the details don't help. They lead the league in offsides with nine calls, five more than the next time (Eagles with four). They're tied for the 10th most false starts (8) and are tied for fourth in unnecessary roughness calls (4).
My issue with those three categories is that it's not even that the Cowboys are getting beaten and thus committing fouls (i.e. offensive holdings, pass interference calls). Instead, these are mental mistake penalties. You can't exonerate players from lining up wrongly or getting late hits in. But discipline ultimately falls on the head coach.
And we're getting tired of hearing how big of a priority it is for Mike McCarthy to reduce them. It's been a few years of that. It needs to be fixed.
The Ugly: Mike McCarthy's offense
Think about the Chargers game. Dak Prescott continuously bailed out the Cowboys by scrambling and making big plays when there wasn't a lot going on.
The perfect example of this is a play from the Chargers game where Dak Prescott drops back out of an empty formation. The play clearly lacks a hot route that should be there to counterattack a free rusher off the edge. Instead, Prescott needs to work some magic to move the chains with his legs.
Beyond that, the Cowboys lack features that modern offenses are leaning into to make life easier for their quarterbacks and playmakers. Consider what A to Z Sports' own Tyler Browning wrote about earlier in the week:
The Cowboys have 127 bunch alignment calls this season, which is 25th in the league, per Pro Football Focus. Last year, at the same point in the season, they had 123, which was 14th. The number was less, but the league is adjusting, while the Cowboys are moving backward.
This year, the Cowboys sit at 53.9% motion/shift percentage, while last year they sat at 57.4%; which is 3% higher than the league average compared to 1% lower than the league average this year.
We'll see what this offense looks like after the bye week. But it simply cannot be as static as it's been over the first six games of the season.
Cowboys expected to be buyers at NFL trade deadline
Help could be on the way.
