The Dallas Cowboys went into New Orleans for some more Thursday night football last week and came away with the win on the back of their defense, just as we all expected. Ezekiel Elliott was held to under 50 yards rushing, only CeeDee Lamb broke 50 yards receiving, and Dak Prescott finished with his third-worst passer rating of the year. But the defense, the one that just gave up 36 points to the Raiders on Thanksgiving? Well, it was switched on this week.
Dallas picked off Saints quarterback Taysom Hill four times. With four different defenders. On the other hand, Hill also managed to run the ball for over 100 yards, giving him one of the strangest 20-point fantasy football performances ever. But the number you really need to know to get the gist of what happened last Thursday comes down to when Hill actually had to throw the ball against a good, if somewhat volatile, Cowboys secondary: 46.3
That’s Taysom Hill’s total completion percentage over the course of Thursday’s game. It was the lowest of his career — but that’s not saying much as it’s only the fifth game he’s really been the quarterback. But it’s also a rarity on the Dallas side. This was just the 14th time since 2010 that the Cowboys defense saw a quarterback attempt at least 15 passes and complete fewer than half of them. And it was the first time they’d done it while nabbing four picks.
Trevon Diggs was the highest-graded secondary defender for the Cowboys last week. He grabbed his league-leading ninth interception late in the fourth quarter, which felt like it sealed the game, before things got a bit weird later on. Overall, Diggs allowed four catches on eight targets, including that one 70-yard touchdown to Deonte Harris in garbage time. And let’s be real: that wasn’t entirely on Diggs. The picks have cooled off a bit as the year has gone on and Diggs hasn’t had quite the same impact on the defense in recent weeks because of it. This week, though, he was back on and allowed a catch rate as low as 50 percent for the first time since Week 5.
We talked a bit last week about how in a lot of ways this secondary swings with the play of Anthony Brown, and this week he swung hard back in the right direction. Brown, despite being the only one of the base secondary starters to not get a pick on Thursday, still finished the game with the second-best coverage grade on the team, per Pro Football Focus. Brown was “picked on,” if we can call it that, as the 14 targets his receivers faced was more than any other Dallas defender. But he only allowed eight catches and a grand total of 4.8 yards per attempt to Taysom Hill on those throws. He also finished the day with two pass breakups, bringing his total to eight on the year, more than any other Dallas defender.
Jayron Kearse allowed the highest catch rate of the day, at 75 percent, but he was targeted only four times. Plus, he came away with the pick of the day as the first half was winding down to a close.
This interception gets better and better, the more you look at it 👌🏽
Still cannot believe that Jayron Kearse made this interception #DALvsNO
— Dallas Nation (@Dallas__Nation) December 3, 2021
Damontae Kazee faced three targets and caught more balls himself than did the receivers he was covering. It was a pretty solid game from the safety, but mentioning his name does bring up the one thing that gave the Dallas defense fits on Thursday: Taysom Hill’s legs.
Damontae Kazee's gotta retire now, those are the rules pic.twitter.com/RELQAJ9MK2
— Christian D'Andrea, 2021 PAC champion (@TrainIsland) December 3, 2021
Taysom Hill ran all over Dallas in this one. This was just the fourth game this season across the entire league in which a quarterback who attempted at least 15 passes also ran the ball for over 100 yards. (Lamar Jackson has done it twice, and Justin Fields once.) This day was special, though, because this was the first time that a quarterback that saw so much success running was, like, bad bad when it came time to throw the ball. A good way to measure a quarterback’s success throwing the ball is by using a statistic called completion percentage over expectation (CPOE). With CPOE, we can add a bit of context to a quarterback’s completion percentage by accounting for the area of the field they’re throwing to. As you might expect, Hill’s CPOE was very negative.
This here gives us a good look at the rarity of the way Dallas shut down the opposing quarterback’s ability to complete passes while simultaneously showing the rarity of Dallas’ inability to stop him on the ground in any way, shape, or form. Hill ran with abandon, to the tune of 9.2 yards per carry. He was tackled by a player in the secondary on seven of his 11 carries, which by itself is a pretty good indicator of how far he was able to run. But it wasn’t enough to overcome his inability to complete passes against that secondary that tackled him seven times.
Last week the Cowboys defense held the Saints to the sixth-worst CPOE in this NFL season — surpassing the Cowboys’ Week 10 performance against Matt Ryan by just a hair. Dallas didn’t let Hill complete much anywhere on the field, but they were most effective when he tried to push the ball downfield. On throws that traveled at least 10 yards in the air, Hill was three of 14 for 76 yards, with one touchdown and three interceptions. Dallas is much more boom-or-bust on these deeper throws than a lot of NFL teams. They only allow completions on 43.6 percent of throws 10-plus yards downfield (ninth in the NFL), but when they do allow those completions, they tend to go pretty far. Dallas has given up the fifth-most passing yards to teams on throws 10-plus yards downfield. They’ve allowed eight touchdowns on these throws but grabbed nine interceptions. This is where the volatility lies in this secondary, and last week it swung in the good direction.
Taysom Hill isn’t exactly a top-tier passing threat, but it’s still good to see the Cowboys shut him down more than any other team ever has. And they needed it, too, as the offense took more than a couple drives off. It’s hard to be good at everything, all the time, so as long as at least one half of this Cowboys team produces each week, they’ll have a good shot to come away with a victory.
