Dallas Run Defense Still A Work In Progress
If you want to beat the Cowboys, the blueprint has been to run the football often.
The NFL knows it. The Cowboys know it. The Cardinals for sure knew it on Sunday.
“It’s a wakeup call,” Lawrence said. “I still think we’re a good football team. We gotta eliminate the mistakes, learn from them and get better.”
It has been that way since before Mike McCarthy arrived as head coach in 2020, and it will probably be that way when his era ends in Dallas.
But at least they are trying to address the problem, especially after last season.
The Cowboys dedicated their first-round draft pick to erasing that blueprint. But Mazi Smith, the 27th pick in last year’s draft, has yet to make an impact at defensive tackle, where stuffing the run is his specialty.
After a couple weeks of keep the opponents running game in check, the Cowboys run defense finally got blitzed in Week 3.
“I like their perimeter players. They have some guys that can play,” McCarthy said about the Cardinals. “We felt that Dobbs would be a bigger challenge this year than he was last year, I mean we played against him with Tennessee, and he wasn’t even there a week. I don’t think we took them lightly. You can’t take anything lightly.”
The Cowboys front four were pushed around on almost every play in the first half last Sunday.
Starters Micah Parsons and DeMarcus Lawrence, as well as Sam Williams and Dorrance Armstrong, on the ends struggled to set the edges, getting caught inside or too far up the field.
Starters Jonathan Hankins and Osa Odighizuwa, as well as Neville Gallimore, Chauncey Golston and Smith, at the tackle spots could not keep the holes plugged.
The Arizona running backs had big holes for inside runs throughout the first half.
“They hit us on a couple of things,” McCarthy said. “At the end of the day if comes down to gap integrity, and we just need to be better.”
In the end, they gave up four runs over 20 yards, all coming in the first half including a Rondale Moore 45-yarder that started with a hole big enough to drive a semi though at the line of scrimmage.
The Cowboys shut it down in the second half, but the damage was done.
“We had six missed tackles in the game,” Quinn said. “So, it wasn’t a super sloppy game in that space, but we just didn’t play with that relentless energy that we’ve kind of grown to know and appreciate about our group.”
The Cardinals gashed them for 183 yards in the first half and it was coming from all angles.
Arizona did it by taking it to the right side of the Cowboys defensive line, attacking right DT Odighizuwa and right DE Parsons head on.
“The real problem is we were too antsy, eager to play,” Lawrence said. “Gap schemes and we got beat on a couple of (run) fits. It’s just all about us learning from our mistakes and get better.”
They used Parsons’ aggressiveness against him by running the ball through the area he just vacated on his rush to make a play.
By running right at the Cowboys best player, and the week’s top defensive player in the NFL, Arizona was able to keep the Cowboys guessing while putting up 222 rushing yards.
“They ran some of the similar schemes, quite honestly, in the second half, but give credit to them,” Quinn said. “But we ended up playing those like we are capable of.”
They had three guys – running back James Connor 98 yards , quarterback Joshua Dobbs 55 yards and wide receiver Rondale Moore 54 yards, rush for over 50 yards in the game and none of them played the same position.
“We gotta play better ball, it’s that simple,” Odighizuwa said.
It is the most yards they have given up on the ground, since the 240 they allowed to the Bears in Week 8 last season. Chicago also had three guys finish with over 50 yards rushing that day – RB Khalil Herbert 99 yards, QB Justin Fields 60 yards and RB David Montgomery 53 yards.