All advanced metrics suggest that the current Cowboys are, shocker here, very bad.
After the Cowboys fell to the Texans on Monday night, losing their fifth straight game, two things have become clear. On one hand, this team is headed in the wrong direction when you look at leading indicators of success. On the other hand, they’re heading in the absolute right direction for a top draft pick.
If the season ended today, the Cowboys would be picking ninth per Tankathon. But looking at the advanced statistics suggests that the Cowboys can aspire to much more than that, but only if you’re operating with the mindset of maximizing draft value. Let’s take a look.
The Cowboys are a very bad football team. Like, super bad. They’re wildly inefficient on both offense and defense, and even special teams has dropped in the DVOA rankings for two straight weeks now.
There are only five teams worse than Dallas in total team DVOA right now, and four of them – the Titans, Raiders, Panthers, and Patriots – are led by rookie head coaches. The one exception is the Browns, who lost to the Cowboys in the season opener.
The EPA-based team tiers are less flattering, somehow. The Cowboys are now 31st in total EPA/play, ever so slightly ahead of the dismal Panthers. While DVOA measures efficiency adjusted for quality of opponent, EPA looks solely at how efficient teams have actually been, regardless of who they played.
In that regard, the Cowboys are the second-worst team in the league through 11 weeks despite seven teams having a worse record. These metrics are certainly not predictive, but if things continue on this trajectory for the rest of the year, the Cowboys are looking at a top three draft pick come April.
Offense
The offense didn’t take much of a dip in the efficiency metrics from last week, but that’s only because they had a whole different kind of inefficiency this time around. Last week, they hardly moved the ball at all, with Cooper Rush averaging a measly two yards per attempt.
This week, Rush had 354 passing yards but also threw a pick, had a fumble returned for a touchdown, and had four turnover worthy plays on the day. The run game was somehow worse, averaging 3.6 yards per carry against a below-average run defense.
Cooper Rush has now started two games, in addition to a handful of plays earlier in the year, and he does not measure up well against the rest of the league. His best metric here is QBR, where he ranks 31st and just barely ahead of Deshaun Watson.
In every other category, Rush is no better than 34th. That makes sense for a backup quarterback, but it’s still a far cry from what you want to see. Dak Prescott wasn’t playing well at all when he went down, but he was still considerably better than what Rush has put up thus far. The dismal numbers are making it very hard to ignore the terrible product this front office has put on the field on offense.
A big part of the offensive struggles has come from the offensive line. The Cowboys have been gradually dropping in adjusted line yards, which measures offensive line success in run blocking, each of the last five weeks. Rico Dowdle has unquestionably been their best running back, but nobody could have success behind this line with the way they’ve been playing.
In pass protection, it’s been a mixed bag. Tyler Smith and Cooper Beebe have been legitimately good, and even Tyler Guyton has fared well for a rookie left tackle. But Zack Martin is easily having the worst year of his career, while Terence Steele is second in most pressures allowed and leads the league in sacks allowed. The right side of the line has been abysmal for the Cowboys all year.
Defense
The defense actually had a solid game, at least for them. They didn’t move up in any of the efficiency rankings, but their actual grades improved somewhat. They also jumped up to fourth in pressure rate, both a sign of how valuable Micah Parsons is and how good Mike Zimmer’s scheme can be; for context, last year’s defense had 16 players record multiple pressures on the year, and so far Zimmer’s defense has 15 players that have done so.
Where Zimmer’s defense has been consistently bad, though, is against the run. That remained true this week, as Joe Mixon absolutely went off from start to finish and averaged nearly as many yards after contact per attempt as he did total yards per carry.
Josh Butler and Israel Mukuamu both recorded their first start of the year, and it went about as you’d expect. Together, they allowed six receptions on nine targets, and both recorded a pass breakup. Butler struggled more, but considering he wasn’t even on the active roster on Monday morning, it’s hard to judge him too harshly.
