The Cowboys have a very serious penalty issue.
The Cowboys may have gotten a win in their last game, snapping their brief losing streak and averting complete and total chaos amongst the fans, but the nature of their Thursday night win over the Giants was anything but convincing. The fact that it came down to a last-second interception from a practice squad player left the fan base looking for people to blame.
As is often the case, the head coach became an easy target. Mike McCarthy is coming off three straight 12-win seasons, something no coach has done in franchise history, but that doesn’t exempt him from criticism. This time, the bulk of the shouting was directed at the Cowboys’ undisciplined play, as the team drew 11 penalties for 89 yards in this one.
Penalties have been an issue, and a talking point, since the 2021 season. That year, the Cowboys led the league in penalties, and Connor Williams was often singled out as the most penalized player in the league. Dallas has remained in the top five in penalties since then, creating a constant through-line of undisciplined play under McCarthy.
Things were starting to look up this year, though. Coming into Thursday night, Dallas was only 13th in total penalties called and 16th in penalty yardage; that was with a Week 1 game that saw both teams handed 11 penalties. In their two losses, the Cowboys were the least-penalized team and totaled just 10 flags over those two weeks. By all accounts, they were playing clean football.
Then came this Thursday night game, and the flags were flying. Unlike their season opener, where things were being called at a high rate on both sides, the Cowboys were being called for penalties much more often; the Giants finished with just four penalties enforced for 35 yards.
So what gives? How can this team play two really clean games while getting blown out for seven of those eight quarters, and then play incredibly sloppy football and come away with a win? One potential explanation, and likely the most plausible one, is that this is what happens when teams have to travel for a game just four days after playing at home. The overall quality of Thursday Night Football games over the years would seem to support this hypothesis.
Could it be more than that, though? Are the Cowboys really just an undisciplined team under McCarthy? Well, let’s take a look at the Packers teams he coached and see how those teams fared with the zebras:
Available data on penalties only goes back to the 2009 season, so we’re missing McCarthy’s first three seasons in Green Bay. Still, this is a fairly large sample size of data that paints a rather interesting picture.
From 2009 to 2018, McCarthy’s Packers had just two seasons where they finished inside the top 10 in either penalties or penalty yardage. Half of the time during this span, the Packers were in the bottom quartile of the NFL in total penalties called. It’s worth pointing out that the most disciplined team here, during the 2011 season, saw McCarthy’s Packers go 15-1 but lose to the Giants in the Divisional Round of the playoffs.
It should be noted here that the 2018 season saw McCarthy fired during the year, so not all of those numbers directly reflect him. That said, the Packers played just four games without McCarthy that year, so it’s still relevant to the overall conversation.
The point here is that McCarthy ran a pretty tight ship in Green Bay. His Packers teams were rarely getting the kind of flag shows the Cowboys get nowadays, and they were usually one of the more disciplined teams in the league. Is it possible that something happened during McCarthy’s year out of coaching that made him lose his knack for instilling discipline in his players?
Or could it be that the Cowboys as an organization has a predilection for drawing the flag more often? Let’s take a look at how the flag has been thrown against America’s Team prior to McCarthy arriving:
There are some really interesting trends here. First off, Wade Phillips had a wildly undisciplined team in 2009 when he broke the Cowboys’ playoff win drought. Things didn’t get all that better under Jason Garrett, though they were technically a little less penalized.
The most curious trend here is that Garrett’s teams were routinely in the top half of the league in penalties called but often ranked well behind in penalty yardage. So they were getting flagged at a very high rate, but it had a minimal impact on their field position. That’s an unusual occurrence in a game or even a season, but it’s downright strange to see it happen repeatedly over a near-decade span of time.
On the whole, though, this paints a picture of a team that has pretty consistently been near the top of the league in penalties in one way or another since 2009. There’s no question they’ve seen the flags go up since McCarthy got to town, but it’s not like the Cowboys were a model of discipline before he arrived.
Furthermore, the fact that McCarthy fielded consistently disciplined teams in Green Bay when it came to penalty stats makes this all the more difficult to sort through. At the end of the day, McCarthy is the head coach and he bears responsibility for his team playing sloppy.
But the data strongly suggests that something else is afoot here. And given the way these historical trends have been borne out over three head coaches since 2009, it seems unlikely that moving on from McCarthy – as some suggested during the most recent game – is the silver bullet to cure the Cowboys’ penalty problem.
