Decoding McCarthy - Week 1
Cowboys Offense stays out of the way in big win versus New York
Every Tuesday, we offer an Xs and Os perspective on the Dallas Offense. This has grown over the years from Decoding Garrett to Decoding Linehan to Decoding Kellen and now to Decoding McCarthy. We want to know how this offense is operating and what makes them good or bad. Rejoice, because yes, we have our film back!
We expected that the Cowboys offense would be under duress and trying to survive the chaos of a road atmosphere to win a divisional road game on Sunday Night. Instead, most of the 40-0 win against the New York Giants felt a lot like it was a dress rehearsal for what would await them down the road in 2023.
Dallas’ offense was able to play a stress-free contest that felt like they were passengers in this defensive demolition of the Giants morale and will. It was simply a matter of the offense not doing anything silly.
Because of our habit, we will examine the defense on Wednesday in this space, but, truth be told, they deserve to go first this week.
It certainly isn’t that the offense played badly, mind you. They did their part and with zero giveaways and five scoring drives (four of at least 50 yards) they have nothing to be ashamed about. We will show you in this piece a lot of things to like. But, there was no fireworks display that wowed the nation and no flexing offensive muscle that sent a message. It was a driving rainstorm at times and the game was over in the first quarter.
The Cowboys racked up only 265 yards of total offense. That number is low by normal standards as we consider an above average game to aim for 360 and an excellent game to exceed 400. Below, I wanted to show you with Game Finder that Dallas is 9-29 in games where they only get to 265 yards in the last 20 years:
(Courtesy ProFootballReference.com)
You might notice the one other game since 2018 that was put in the victory column of this nature was last year’s Week 5 affair at Los Angeles. They are 2-6 in that stretch now, but the other win was the exact same formula. A special teams touchdown and then a takeaway gave the Cowboys an early lead, and an entire week of us imagining how to play that game disappeared in an opening flurry. The Cooper Rush offense that week went from preparing to deal with Aaron Donald and the Super Bowl Champion Rams in their stadium to trying not to get in the way of a blitzkrieg from the Dallas defense and special teams. When this happens, you just play a clean game – Dallas was +3 against the Rams that day and +3 against the Giants on Sunday – and stay out of the way.
So they did.
But, there are still some very interesting concepts to show you as we attempt to Decode new parts of this Cowboys offense today. Come along!
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