Decoding McCarthy, Wk 5 - Wrecked by the Niners...again.

The new offensive approach appears to have fewer answers than the old one.

Analyzing offense can be tricky. It bakes in so many narratives about how we follow this sport.

Who is running the offense? Who is playing QB? And the relative merits of both, we can fuel sports talk radio for weeks without visiting any other sector of this complex sport.

Did Mike McCarthy show us anything that Kellen Moore did not? Did Dak Prescott learn from the first few meetings vs the 49ers and adjust accordingly?

Negative.

But, there is much more to it.

There is an entire offense trying to block the best defense in football. There are receivers trying to get open and hopefully being given good plays to do so. And yes, there is a hope your defense is getting a stop once in a while.

Sunday was a mess in every category. From an offensive standpoint, it is the third meeting with the 49ers (albeit this one was low stakes in Week 5 vs the other two being playoff clashes) and none of them were able to score more than 17 points, hold the ball, get even 5 yards per play, and get close to 350 yards of total offense.

Here is the game-log for the offense in each matchup:

You might say the home game vs San Francisco was a D, last January’s performance was a F, and this one was an F-minus. This was the worst of them (4 giveaways!), but none of them got it done in any way. And we could argue it is getting worse.

Today, we want to focus on what lost the game instead of what made it worse.

What lost the game was the way this offense played in the first half.

Yes, the interceptions are a problem, but falling behind so quickly is the true issue. You had months to prepare a game plan for a meeting with the 49ers and the first four drives offered 10 plays for 8 yards, zero first downs, and a giveaway.

We want to examine that start-of-game script from Mike McCarthy to see what the thought process might have been for this showdown meeting.