I guess we’ll find out next year whether it was Linehan or Dak Prescott holding back the Cowboys’ offense. One thing was for certain: teams knew how to stop Dallas more often than not this year. Of course, all of the injuries on the offensive line didn’t help, nor did the off-season departures of all the pass catchers.
Bob Sturm of The Ticket writes a Cowboy Blog in the Athletic. The numbers he provided in his latest article demonstrate clearly how far the Cowboys have to come:
"The four teams left in the playoffs are the league’s four highest-scoring teams. All four also ranked in the top five of passing offense DVOA. For those unaware, DVOA, Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, is an advanced metric used to measure efficiency considering circumstances. For example, a two-yard run on 3rd-and-1 is vastly different than a two-yard run on 3rd-and-15 and DVOA takes things like that into account. It’s a percentage — 0 is the baseline — and positive and negative percentages are above and below league average, respectively). The Chiefs were overwhelmingly No. 1 at 63 percent, Saints were No. 3 at 34.4 percent, Patriots No. 4 at 32.9 percent and Rams were No. 5 at 32.1 percent. The Chargers (No. 2) were ousted by the Patriots Sunday.
Where were the Cowboys in this category?
You would need to scroll, keep scrolling, keep scrolling — and — stop! There they are, 26th; checking in at -0.9 percent. Dallas was the only team to be negative in this category and make the postseason. The next-worst passing offense among playoff teams belonged to the Chicago Bears, at 7.4 percent."
Sorry for the compressed format of the table below - not sure how to “clean it up” here. But here is a link to the article if you’d like to look at it directly: https://theathletic.com/774818/2019/01/ … e-cowboys/
Points/Game\tPoints/Drive\tPassing/Game\tPassing/Play\tYards/Play
Chiefs\t1st\t1st\t3rd\t1st\t1st
Rams\t2nd\t3rd\t5th\t3rd\t2nd
Saints\t3rd\t2nd\t12th\t4th\t7th
Patriots\t4th\t9th\t8th\t6th\t9th
Cowboys\t22nd\t17th\t23rd\t22nd\t22nd