Cowboys HC Mike McCarthy's decision will benefit Dak Prescott significantly
The sound of pads and helmets clashing won't be around during the spring days of the Dallas Cowboys OTAs. Those will wait until the summer. There won't even be competitive 11-on-11 drills as the team has been fined twice in the last couple of years. However, there will be a different sound: That of pencils […]
The sound of pads and helmets clashing won't be around during the spring days of the Dallas Cowboys OTAs. Those will wait until the summer. There won't even be competitive 11-on-11 drills as the team has been fined twice in the last couple of years.
However, there will be a different sound: That of pencils pressing against notebooks as players take notes during team installs.
It's perhaps the most important thing about OTAs. And this year, it's even more so for the Cowboys as head coach Mike McCarthy takes over the offense as the play-caller and offensive architect. In one way or another, the team is bound to do things differently than they did when Kellen Moore ran the unit.
That being said, McCarthy made it clear the Cowboys are not tearing apart a critical element of the offense from recent years: language.
"We're still in Dak's language," McCarthy told reporters on Thursday. "We're definitely building off (of it)."
That's certainly huge and a very promising sign the Cowboys coaching staff is doing things the right way. While philosophies from one offensive scheme to another vary significantly, the biggest difference between them has always been language. In the modern NFL, the same concepts are used in the West Coast scheme and the Air Coryell scheme. But many times, they're simply communicated differently.
That the coaches are willing to adapt to what players like Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Michael Gallup have been working with for years now is exactly what you want to hear.
There's no question that the person who benefits the most from it is Prescott. McCarthy will want to do things differently when it comes to the plays being called and the overall philosophy on offense. But the language remaining consistent will be very important for a quarterback leading a team in win-now mode.
"If you look at the history of our offense here, 2020 was really (about) figuring out who we wanted to be," said McCarthy. "We had the pandemic and all the injuries and so forth."
But it's the last couple of years that could provide the blueprint to where the Cowboys' offense is going with a different coach holding the playsheet.
"I think the evolution from 2021 to 2022 is really the direction we want to continue to build off of," added the Cowboys head coach. "If you look at the statistics of those three years in the areas of the direction we're going, we'll continue in that direction."
