Veteran Staff Gives Cowboys Advantage
With a new scheme, a new offensive coordinator and a new play caller, the Cowboys offense was ready to unleash all they had been working on since falling to San Francisco in the Divisional round of the NFC playoffs last season.
The play sheet was overflowing with ways to punish the Giants defense.
Heck, the new duo was even ready for whatever Mother Nature had to offer.
“With Mike coming from Green Bay, or you’re me coming from New York with the Jets and in Seattle, you’re used to weather, wind, bad field surfaces,” Cowboys new offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer said. “You learn over the years you better have (a plan for the weather), you just can’t predict it. Obviously, we are spoiled here, playing all of our games inside. But, if you don’t have (a weather game plan), you might get, not necessarily embarrassed, but caught off guard. We will always have one anytime we play outside and be ready to get to it at a moment’s notice.”
Good thing, because down came the rain, putting a quick wrench in their reveal party.
“We watched the rain all week,” McCarthy said. “We had an opportunity to do the wet ball drills. And, like anything as a coach, did I do enough of it? So, maybe should have done more of it, because we did it two days instead of all three workdays.”
On game day, he was ready with a plan. A plan that he uses every week, no matter the weather.
“I have a process that I go through, and then I do a final lap there at the stadium – I’ve always done it this way,” McCarthy said. “I have a certain marking that I put on the plays that I really want to focus on.”
Good thing, because the rain was falling, and it drenched the duo’s party for almost the full 60 minutes on Sunday night. But, McCarthy, the team’s new play caller, and his team, were ready for whatever Mother Nature dumped on East Rutherford, New Jersey.
“The adjustment to the rain plan, I thought our players handled it seamlessly,” McCarthy said. “There were a number of packages that we canceled out. One got canceled out in the second quarter and a number of things at halftime.”
With a shortened-up game plan, rain pounding down and a quick lead that grew continuously, the Cowboys only mustered up 265 yards of total offense, including a pedestrian 143 yards on 13 of 24 passing for quarterback Dak Prescott.
“We always want to be flexible enough,” Schottenheimer said. “So, there are certainly things that we know that if it’s bad conditions – whether that’s rain, whether that’s wind, whether the field is slick, we’ve got a plan of where we want to go to. … The hard thing (Sunday night) … we could just never get a flow of it. … I thought we were prepared for it, but it was sloppy. It was a tough night.”