Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
61° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Football

What Must the Cowboys Do to Make Next Year’s Super Bowl? Start With This List

Only two teams are still standing in the NFL playoffs. Dallas isn't one of them. Here's what they can do to avoid staying home in the snow next year.
By |
Image

Only two teams remain in the NFL playoffs, and for so much of the regular season, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Dallas could have been one of them. The Cowboys have a lot of great pieces on their roster and there were stretches of the regular season when they looked like the best team in a wide-open NFC East. Instead, we got another divisional-round loss.

They are committed to their quarterback. They have one of the game’s most dynamic defensive playmakers who will only be entering his second pro season next year. They’ve got multiple receiving threats. And yet, something is missing. Something has to be missing, otherwise the Cowboys would have more than one playoff win in the six seasons since Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott arrived. 

So what can they do to make sure they’re playing for a Super Bowl next year instead of sitting at home in the snow? Here are a few suggestions.

Extend Dalton Schultz

The Cowboys handed out a good-sized contract to a tight end following the 2020 season. They just gave it to the wrong one. Blake Jarwin is not a bad player, nor is it his fault that he tore his ACL in Week 1 of the 2020 season. But it did open the door for Dalton Schultz to surpass him. And in 2021, Schultz became even more of a staple of this offense.

Schultz finished the year second among Cowboys pass catchers in both targets and catches, and tied with Amari Cooper for the team lead in touchdown receptions. He was one of just 23 players in the NFL with at least one catch in every game this season and one of only five tight ends to accomplish that feat.

Image

That made him Prescott’s most reliable target. Prescott’s EPA/play was better targeting Schultz than it was for any other player on the team, and while EPA isn’t a great measure for receiver talent, specifically, it’s worth noting because it indicates that when the Cowboys threw to Schultz, it worked.

The Cowboys are in a bit of a tough spot with the salary cap, so they’ll need to move money around somewhere to be able to afford Schultz. Perhaps it’s the cost of absorbing Jarwin’s $5.8 million cap hit in 2022. Perhaps it’s something else. Almost anything would be well worth doing to keep a player the Cowboys can’t really afford to lose.

Shore up the run defense

The Cowboys defense made great strides in 2021, taking a bottom-five defense in terms of points allowed and whipping it into a top-10 defense just one year later. That turnaround had little to do with their ability to stop the run.

The Cowboys have ranked in the bottom third of the NFL in terms of EPA/rush allowed to opposing offenses in each of the last two years. Pro Football Focus has been even harder on Dallas, grading their run defense at 27th league-wide this year after finishing 26th last season.

Image

There are two phases to playing defense, and while I’d argue being good against the pass is significantly more impactful, it can’t come at the expense of being one of the worst teams in the league on the ground. It’s worth looking into adding a few big bodies to fill out the interior of the defensive line, especially in third-and-short or goal-line situations. While third-round draft pick Osa Odighizuwa showed promise rushing the passer in his rookie year, he left much to be desired in the run game.

The good news is they should be able to add a player or two without investing too many resources. One affordable suggestion would be Al Woods, who spent last year with the Seattle Seahawks on a one-year, $1.25 million base salary deal. He finished the season with the fifth-highest Run Stop Win Rate (RSWR) in the NFL, per ESPN. The 34-year-old Woods shouldn’t command a ton of money in the offseason, and if he still wants to play there’s no reason Dallas couldn’t give him a call.

Add more pieces to the secondary

After Micah Parsons, the Cowboys’ secondary was the biggest reason this defense improved by such leaps and bounds. Much of that comes down to turnovers. The team finished the year with a whopping 26 interceptions, five of which they returned for touchdowns. Watching Trevon Diggs snag a pick for six straight weeks to start the year was incredible. 

Unfortunately, they’ll be hard-pressed to replicate that next year. The following chart shows every NFL team’s season-long interception total for every year since 1999, along with their interception total the following year. 

Image

There is essentially no real correlation. Interceptions returned for touchdowns are even less correlated than this, but I won’t subject you to yet another chart just to prove that. All you need to know is Dallas’ secondary will likely not be able to rely on those big, splashy turnovers that got them so far in 2021. 

That’s especially bad news for Diggs. The second-year star racked up 11 interceptions this year, a number last reached in 1981 by another Cowboy, Everson Walls. But he was targeted much more often than 11 times, and those other plays weren’t nearly as successful. PFF ranked Diggs 75th out of 190 cornerbacks by coverage grade, even including the interceptions. According to them, he allowed over 1,000 yards in coverage and five touchdowns to opposing receivers.

This isn’t meant to completely tear down Diggs, but it should make you wary to call him the next great shutdown cornerback just because he’s got great ball skills. Dallas needs to continue to develop him into a corner who can make plays on every down, not just the ones when he comes away with the football. They should also look to the draft to find another corner to add to the competition as well. An early draft name to keep an eye on: Kyler Gordon out of the University of Washington, who has experience playing both outside corner and in the slot.

Use more motion at the snap

Setting aside whatever roster upheaval comes in the next six months, the Cowboys could also improve in the play-calling department. In particular, Dallas all but refused to run plays with a man in motion at the time of the snap this season.

This might seem like a weird, specific gripe, but there is mounting evidence that simply having a player move from side to side at the time the ball is snapped can add a noticeable improvement to an offense’s efficiency of an offense. This holds true for both pass plays and run plays. It makes sense on an intuitive level as well. Playing defense requires rapid reactions and a litany of reads of the offensive formations. Moving a player from one side of the field to the other while the ball is being snapped is an easy way to create confusion, potentially leading to a mix-up of who is covering who.

This seems like a somewhat simple addition to an offense that, at times, struggled significantly. Add in a wrinkle or two that makes it harder for defenses to guess what’s coming, and maybe we’ll get more elite Dak Prescott games in 2022 than we did in 2021.

Author

Dan Morse

Dan Morse

View Profile
Dan covers the Cowboys for StrongSide. He is a Pacific Northwest native & self-described nerd who has been covering the…

Related Articles

Image
Football

Joel Klatt Is Pumped for the UFL

The league's first-ever game goes down Saturday at Choctaw Stadium.
Image
Football

What Does Life After Tyron Smith Look Like For the Cowboys?

Dallas' longtime left tackle is expected to leave in free agency. It's the end of an era, and it prompts questions about the next one begins.
Advertisement