In their first meeting with the Commanders earlier this season, Dak Prescott completed 15 of his 20 passing attempts within 10 yards for 81 yards and two touchdowns.<\/p>\n
Dallas has multiple different ways that they can get to those types of plays. George Pickens\u2019 quick slant routes were one of them. We\u2019ve seen quick throws from Prescott to his tight ends on curls routes too. Or, Prescott can get into his groove in the play action game and hit someone on a crosser as well.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the Cowboys will have their choice for how they can use the short passing game to move downfield. The good news is, the Commanders have struggled recently to get pressure on the quarterback since their first meeting with Dallas, when they lost DE and former Cowboy Dorance Armstrong for the season to a knee injury. Since Armstrong\u2019s injury, Washington has gone from a 40.7% pressure rate (third-highest in the NFL) to 25.9% (second-lowest).<\/p>\n
Chance to try new things on defense<\/p>\n
We saw a little bit of experimentation from the Cowboys in a few ways last week, most notably with defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus moving from the sideline to the coaches booth in order to try and gain a better perspective of the defense.<\/p>\n
Another moment that stood out was a specific formation where the Cowboys had three down linemen, and Donovan Ezeiruaku lined up like a linebacker and rushed against the interior of the offensive line as opposed to the outside like he usually does. He was trying to spring open Kenny Clark on a stunt, but the Cowboys couldn\u2019t get home.<\/p>\n
While that specific instance didn\u2019t work, this week\u2019s game and next week\u2019s serve as an opportunity to continue to try different things and see if there\u2019s anything that you can find success with that could carry over into next season.<\/p>\n
For example, and I\u2019m not saying this is the sole option that could be experimented with nor am I hinting it\u2019ll happen, what about trying some more six-man blitzes? The Cowboys have sent six rushes 5.8% of the time this year, the tenth-lowest mark in the league. Could that be a way where they can finally turn pressure into sacks?<\/p>\n
Believe it or not, the Cowboys have recorded the 15th highest pressure rate in the NFL this season at 34.7%. Pressure is well and good, but getting the quarterback to the ground and forcing them into bad decisions is what makes that number look better. The Cowboys have struggled to do the latter half of that equation, but could try some new things against Washington considering the quarterback situation they are in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In their first meeting with the Commanders earlier this season, Dak Prescott completed 15 of his 20 passing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,932,104,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-100514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-cowboys-news","10":"tag-dallas-headlines","11":"tag-dallas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}