The Detroit Lions have a must-win game this week against the Dallas Cowboys. In the past few weeks, this Cowboys offense has been lighting things up with their passing attack led by Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and George Pickens.

That’s why Lions fans were a bit surprised to see Lions head coach Dan Campbell talk about how stopping the run would be Detroit’s prime objective in this game.

“…So much of it is going to start with shutting this run game down,” Campbell said. “We cannot let this run game get going. Because those guys (Lamb and Pickens) are a handful anyway on the perimeter. But if we can just at least shut down some of this two-dimensional football, that’s going to go a long way for us.”

Why the Lions shutting down the run stops the Cowboys’ offense

Earlier this week, we talked to our Cowboys beat writer, Mauricio Rodriguez, about how the Lions can get after the Cowboys’ tackles to help them bring the pressure. Rodriguez said there’s a counter to that for the Cowboys, and it starts with their run game.

“However, the Cowboys are countering this in two ways: Dak Prescott has been great at getting rid of the football quickly when needed. But his time to throw is around league average because Dallas balances this by calling deep shots off play-action with max-protect looks to manufacture explosive plays. It’s a pretty well-designed offense, and the way to get it off track is to build up an early lead to force them off of those play-action shots.”

There it is, right? Campbell talked about this, too. The Cowboys want the play-action setups to get their big passes, and how they get to them is for the defenses to respect the run game. If you take away the run, you force the Cowboys to work in their normal dropbacks, where you can keep things in front of you and have a better chance to get pressure and force Prescott to make a mistake. Take a look at his splits this season:

Look, Prescott is good normally, but he’s really good when using play action. So the goal is to take that away from him. The good news is that the Lions have one of the best run defenses in the league right now. They’re allowing the fifth-lowest rush yards per carry and the 11th-fewest rushing yards this season. These guys need to come to work and stop the run early and often, and then take the lead on arguably one of the worst defenses in the league.

If they can do these things, they’re walking out with a win on Thursday night.

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