Before the Dallas Cowboys’ Week 7 bye, Dak Prescott had completed 132 of 190 passes for 1,333 yards, six touchdowns, four interceptions, and a passer rating of 91.0.
Since the Dallas Cowboys’ Week 7 bye, Dak Prescott has completed 127 of 180 passes for 1,602 yards, 17 touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 124.8. Prescott’s completion rate has risen from 69.5% to 70.6%, and that’s especially impressive because he’s been throwing completing so many deep balls of late — before the bye, he attempted 19 passes of 20 or more air yards, completing eight for 194 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 92.9. Since the bye, Prescott has completed 20 of his 33 deep throws for 565 yards, six touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 144.3. When you’re just about perfect on the game’s toughest throws, you are indeed playing with house money.
So, what’s changed for America’s Team in the last few weeks? Why have the Cowboys gone from a 4-2 team led by their defense before the bye, and 100% Dak since?
After a 45-10 Thanksgiving Day win over the Washington Commanders in which Prescott completed 22 of 32 passes for 331 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 142.1 (and got Washington defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio fired along the way), head coach Mike McCarthy talked about why it’s working so well on that side of the ball.
“We’re rolling through our menus. We’re not a ‘create the wheel’ system approach. I don’t believe in that. I mean, we don’t chase new ideas and concepts. If there’s a wrinkle that we feel helps us, it’s a variation of what we’ve already done. We have so many invested reps in the spring and training camp and that’s the foundation of who we are. Because it takes time to get the timing and efficiency where you want it each and every year and the fact of the matter is you have less time together. That’s why I give all these NFL players in today’s game an incredible amount of respect for what they do away from the building and that five weeks off a summer. That’s a critical time now in development of an offensive passing game. Which you were able to get that done in the past in the spring and training camp.
“There’s a lot that goes on and I just think that those types of adjustments and I think we looked like a first year offense a little bit the first four weeks. But we played the way we needed to play to win and won some games decisively too. We played to our defense, and it served us well. We want to complement each other. When they give us an opportunity, we need to go put it in the endzone. We need to get out in front, when we’re out in front our pass rush is lethal.”
Well, now the passing game is just as lethal, if not more so. Let’s dive into the tape to see why and how it’s happened.
Pre-snap motion has become a thruway to explosive plays.
In the first six weeks of their season, the Cowboys had six explosive passing plays with pre-snap motion. Since Week 8, they’ve had 13, and it’s become a staple of the offense. Dallas will use quick return motion to give Prescott matchup advantages, especially against man coverage. Prescott doesn’t need man/zone indicators out of motion as he’s a tremendous pre-snap diagnostician, but these subtle wrinkles do help to establish one-on-ones.
On this 22-yard completion to Brandin Cooks against the Carolina Panthers in Week 11, CeeDee Lamb’s motion across the formation took cornerbacks Ty Hill and Donte Jackson, which left Cooks open over them for Prescott’s throw. When Jalen Tolbert ran the vertical route on the switch release, that took safety Xavier Woods out of the picture.
Here was a nifty motion against the New York Giants in Week 10 — tight end Jake Ferguson running a sit route to the left flat after motioning outside of Lamb, which gave Lamb the one-on-one downfield against cornerback Deonte Banks, with safety Xavier McKinney taking Ferguson underneath. The Cowboys are getting really good at displacing defenders with this stuff.
“I mean, you have to play true,” Lamb said after the Giants game when asked what defenses have to do when this offense works correctly. :There are only so many yards you’re going to let BCooks, MG [Michael Gallup] and then the running backs get going until you just, CeeDee don’t deserve two guys. We may need to put one more in a box or we may have to just stay true. And that’s not going to lie. Because winning our matches, winning our individual battles, being where we got to be, being on time, staying true to our offense, trusting the process. We’re going to do some great things.”
More play-action, in frequency and effectiveness.
Similarly, play-action has become far more of a constant in the Cowboys’ successful search for explosive passing plays. Prescott has 10 such completions with play-action this season, eight have come since the bye.
It’s an important construct, because Prescott has the arm to make cross-body throws on these types of plays, and the sail and over routes are particularly effective out of play-action. Against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 9, Prescott faked the handoff to running back Rico Dowdle, which took linebackers Nick Morrow and Zach Cunningham out of underneath coverage. Philly was in Cover-1, and that put rookie cornerback Eli Ricks on Lamb in the left slot. Not the best matchup for the Eagles.
And against the Commanders’ woebegone defense on Thanksgiving, Prescott dove through Washington’s all-out blitz with a fake to Tony Pollard before hitting Cooks on this sick stutter-post. Touchdown, Cowboys.
Prescott's physical and mental attributes are aligning perfectly.
As we’ve already written, Prescott is one of the NFL’s best pre-snap defensive analysts, and he’s really locked into that role as he takes more and more command of the offense. One specific example was his 35-yard pass to Ferguson against the Commanders. The Cowboys had first-and-15 at their own five-yard line, so as a quarterback, you’d better have faith in your offense to make a throw like this.
After the game, Prescott was more than happy to explain why he looked at that throw with a cake-eating grin on his face — he had the defense played out in his mind throughout.
“It was an attack tempo play, knowing we could catch them off-guard. We caught them in a cover two, they weren’t quite ready for it. The safeties [Kameron Curl and Percy Butler] got wide initially then as they tried to squeeze, it was Jake on a ‘backer [linebacker Cody Barton]. And he did a great job of running and taking the middle, doing it with speed. And it goes into just the preparation, the footwork, trusting in it, believing in it. Confidence in that guy. Confidence in that guy to go make plays across the middle.”
The Commanders looked to be in Cover-6 with a Tampa-style dropping linebacker, but the point remains — when you have a quarterback who can peer into the souls of enemy defenders, you have something you can win with week after week.
Can they keep this up?
McCarthy has said that the offense has been a process this season, and that after the bye week, things were going to have to get more expansive. It didn’t start well, either — Prescott was sacked on three of his first four dropbacks against the Rams in Week 8 — but things have improved exponentially since then.
“When we looked at the offense through the bye, it’s just like everything else,” McCarthy said after a 43-20 win over the Rams in which Prescott completed 25 of 31 passes for 304 yards, four touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 133.7. “You really chew down on it and take a lot of the situation of football out of it. Obviously with these big victories, we didn’t punt until we got to four-minute offense there at the end. You have to look through that and focus on the direction you want to go forward. I thought our analytics department did a really nice job on their deep dive. One of the things that came out of it is that we didn’t start very fast last year and we were actually, from a production standpoint, further ahead. I think its just like anything, the statistics are excellent, and the analytics part is excellent.
“We just really need to stay true and give these guys opportunities. We definitely came in here today and felt like we needed to tilt to gain more toward the passing game. We felt like these guys were excellent in the pass rush area. I think its just trying to grow the offense and the defense all the way through. Like I said, this has been a great week with the amount of extra work we got done with the players and then the excellent reward today with the win.”
To be fair, Dallas’ offensive upswing has come against the teams ranking 32rd in Defensive DVOA against the pass (the Commanders), 22nd (the Panthers), and 21st (the Eagles).
But the Rams rank 14th, and the Giants rank 16th, so it’s not as if they’re just beating up on inferior opponents — well, except for the Commanders. And when you isolate the different parts of this passing game right now, it’s clear that the Cowboys are ready to line up against anybody. As for the slate through the end of the regular season, it’s the Seahawks, Eagles, Bills, Dolphins, Lions, and Commanders — which places Dallas’ future opponents with an aggregate rank of 22nd in DVOA against the pass.
So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
