Below is a table of key stats for their respective last 5 games, Vikings were 2 and 3 and the Boys were 4 and 1. Look at the score differentials, sacks,third down efficiency, run yards and average per rush, time of possession, turnovers and penalties. Also remember the level of competition that the Vikings played vs. the Boys.

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I have been reading a lot of posts about bad calls, our penalties and sacks as if we beat ourselves. We did commit mistakes, but a lot of those were caused by the Green Bay offense and defense.

Green Bay beat us every which way. Consider this, Green Bay was sacked 4 times and had 12 penalties vs. our 5 sacks and 10 penalties. They overcame all of that, forced 3 turnovers and beat us. We forced no turnovers and did'nt do squat. Aaron Rogers converted first down after first down in their first touchdown drive, with two third down's over 10 yards. Aaron Rogers was on and Tony Romo was off. Romo could not find the blitzers and he paid for it.

The Cowboys had 140 meaningless yards after it got to be 17-0 and 7:30 of possession time. That means with 10:00 minutes left in the 4th quarter, we had accumulated 130 yards, 17 minutes of possession time and only 27 plays. They kicked our butts good. We were outscheemed, out hustled and they executed.Once they went up 10 to nothing, we seemed to fall apart further. If you look at our last 12 month losses, the Boy's seem to be front runners. Get behind and it is curtains.

I think the good thing out of this is this came against Green Bay and not against a division opponent. It also shows some more flaws that we have so they can be worked on. Washington is a good defensive team and they will be taking notes. Dallas was playing conservative on both sides of the ball and they are not good enough to do so against a good team.

For the most part, this analysis will study drive charts and trends with some stats mixed in, much the same way I did last week with Philly (by the way that analysis was born out by the game, I will discuss far below). In addition, I will key in on the GB losses instead of the wins. The wins were for the most part were against sad sacks (Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Chicago), so they really skew the stats. Their losses were against Vikings twice, Tampa Bay and the Bengals and it seems like it is better to compare to those teams that are more in line with Dallas.

There are two tales of the tape for the Packers when looking at their losses. If you look at the GB defensive stats, it says that GB has a great defense (4th in the league in yards per game vs. 18th in scoring defense), however this is deceiving.  Their defense vs. the opposing offenses in games they lost is not very good (20th). Of the total scoring drives by the opposing offense during losses by GB, 22 of those drives came during losing games vs. 30 for all the games, which is simply amazing. Of those 22 scoring drives, 10 came on long drives, 3 on short drives, 4 from special teams play and the rest came from a combination of turnovers and big plays on offense. Points scored against GB in losing games were 137 (34 per game) vs. a total score from all games of 172 points. Another amazing fact is GB suffered 26 sacks on offense in the losing games vs. GB only causing 2 sacks on defense in the losing games!! Green Bay gave up 970 yards passing and around 400 yards running during their losing games. During the losing games, they gave up over 50% conversion on third down except to Tampa Bay.  The average per rush that GB gave up on defense in defeats is below 4.0. They caused 6 turnovers in their losses. I think in summary, Green Bay’s lack of pass rush is their Achilles heel. It seems like GB is trying hard to stop the rush (they seem to be pretty good at this), but cannot stop the pass because of their lack of pass rushing.  The Cowboys have a good record in sustaining drives and GB does not have a good record in stopping drives. Dallas should think about using the short passes to set up the run and then try their deeper balls when they get around mid field. They should use the lead draw quite a bit once they have established their pass.  I think Dallas might be able to score in the 30’s on this team. One other note, it looks like their best pass rusher (Kaupman) will be out this week, which will even compound their putrid pass rush.

The second tale of the tape is their offense. Their offense remains very potent; however they have had a rash of offensive line problems.  GB’s offense in losing games has been amazingly similar to all games relating to the drive charts. GB had 17 scoring drives in the 4 games they lost vs. a total of 38 scoring drives for all the games.  Of the total 17 scoring drives, 7 were on long drives, 5 on big plays and 5 on turnovers. For the total year, they have 12 scoring drives on turnovers, 12 for big plays and the remaining 14 on long drives and short drives. Their offense drive charts are very much like Philadelphia, both relying on turnovers and big plays for a good portion of their offense, however a little better on long drives than Philadelphia. I think one of the reasons why GB has been able to sustain long drives is Roger’s ability to scramble, his accuracy and a decent running game. Their offense has still been able to average around 26 points a game during their losses which is very similar to their wins. They are averaging around 4.7 yards per rush during their losses. They have a great offense that can score on anyone, except for 2 big deficiencies. They have a terrible offensive line for pass protection and they commit a lot of penalties. Green Bay is second in penalty yards and dead last in giving up sacks. Both of these deficiencies are drive killers. Cowboys need the same defensive game plan as they did vs. Phil. (limit GB run for longer 3rd downs). Dallas also needs to have a controlled pass rush and keep in their lanes, as well as maybe having a spy on Rogers.  Green Bay on the other hand needs to go to short passing at the beginning and runs to keep them in short yardage situations. Also as a reminder, it looks like the Dallas defense is around #7 (yards per game) for the last 6 games. I saw the GB bloggers looking at the Cowboys defense as # 20 and GB’s as #6, so they are coming to the conclusion they have a much better defense. Their 4 winning games to weak sisters have given their defensive stats a boost. If you look at their defense against the tougher teams, they are #20 in yards per game, much less their horrible defensive sack totals.

Other considerations are the GB staff, players and fans are really down after the loss and their confidence is low. Their offensive line is in upheaval and they may lose Kaupman this week. Their special teams are awful and are last in the league. With all of this said, Dallas really needs to guard in the early going on taking chances / turnovers so GB does not get back its confidence in the first quarter or so. GB has a lot of offensive big play potential so Dallas needs to play their receivers somewhat how they did against the Eagles, and the overall defensive game plan should be very similar to the Eagles game plan. On offense, Dallas can be reasonably aggressive once they have a couple of series under their belts. By that time, they should be able to determine how the GB defensive game plan is leaning (stop run or pass) and react accordingly. I think this game goes Dallas 34 and 24 for GB, assuming the weather is decent.

Just as a Philly review (my pregame analysis vs. the actual game), it held up pretty good. Dallas had a conservative offense plan and Dallas played field position. I predicted that Philly could not sustain high scoring drives. 9 of their points came on sustained drives, 7 came as a result of big plays. Philly had poor field positions all night. We won the turnover battle based on the conservative game plan and frustrating McNabb (his passing was terrible as usual when he has to sustain drives). The one thing I thought was Dallas could sustain drives better, but Dallas’s scoring came on turnovers and big plays for the most part.

Below is a "different approach" to analyzing the games with the Eagles, using drive analysis instead of just pure stats.

I went back and looked at the drive charts for each game this year, looking at the Eagles and their opponents and the Cowboys and their opponents. I broke the scoring drives into categories: Long Drive (drive starting from the 39 or longer with no play over 35 yards), Short Drive (drive starting at 40 or long with no play over 35 yards), Turnovers (those drives that started with a turnover without a direct TD, regardless of length of drive), Big Play Offense (all drives that had a play over 35 yards, regardless of where it started), Big Play Defense (defensive touchdowns on Turnovers) and Big Play Special Teams (touchdown from returns). If a play was designated a Big Plays (BPO, BPD, BPS, Turnovers), I classified it as such and did not fall into Long or Short Drives

For the Eagles on offense, they scored on 35 out of 88 drives. The amazing fact is only 6 of the 37 scoring drives came on long plays and only 5 of the 37 scoring drives came on short drives! 26 out of 37 scoring drives came on Big Plays / Turnovers! Of the 26 scoring drives coming from Big Plays, 1 came from BPST, 3 came from BPD, 10 came from Turnovers and 12 came from BPO. Of the 12 from BPO, 5 came from Jackson, 3 from Celek and 3 from Maclin. I think the takeaway from here are the Big Plays to Jackson and the fact only 6 out of 88 drives came from a long field!

For the Eagles on Defense, they allowed 23 scoring drives out of 94 drives. 7 scoring drives came from Long Drives, 8 from Short Drives, 5 from TO, 2 from BPO and 1 from BPD. Bad news is the Eagles are not beating themselves, good news is it seems like you can mount a long / short drive on them.

For the Cowboys on offense, the tale of the tape is different when compared to the Eagle offense. Cowboys had 85 total drives, scoring on 35. They had a whopping 20 Long Drives, 3 Short Drives, 2 score off of TO, 8 drives from BPO, one play BPD and 2 from BPST (Crayton of course). What is encouraging from this is the ability for Dallas to make long drives and keep the Eagles off the field or, if they do not score on either long or short drives, to punt it and pin the Eagles back. It does not seem like the Eagles can score on a long field except for Jackson.The discouraging is the scores resulting from TO’s (this maybe due some of the BPO’s scores after a turnover).

For the Dallas on Defense, they were also stingy on defensive scoring. The other team scored on 24 of 85 drives. 14 on Long Drives, 2 on Short Drives, 6 on TO’s, one on BPO and one on BPD. The number of long drives are discouraging but when compared to the BPO it says this defense is bend but do not break.

One other note, I went back through the 2008 / 2009 season looking at the Eagles losses. What I saw was the Eagles seemed to always lose when the number of passes were doubled compared to the number of runs. In those situation, it seemed like either the Eagles running was anemic, Eagles got behind early or in some cases Reid just got pass happy. Donovan McNabb is not good in these situations as he is not very accurate with his shorter passes.

Just to summarize, the Eagles tendencies on offense is the Cowboys strength on defense (Eagles BPO and anemic Long Drive Capability vs. the Cowboys bend but do not break defense). The Cowboys offense can be a problem for the Eagles defense if they can sustain a couple of first downs and punt it for a long field or just drive it for a few field goals (of course taking a few long shots when they are near mid field). The Cowboys should play bend but do not break and double up on Jackson with the corner they want to protect, and put their best corner on Macklin. Cowboys need to play the run first (while doubling Jackson) to turn them into a one dimensional team and make McNabb beat them on short passing. The Eagles seem to make more hay with turnovers than the Cowboys, and obviously this is biggest key because of the Eagles noise / crowd and the Cowboys psyche.

Hi, my name is Mike.

I have not posted here before, but I wanted to do look at some of the wests teams standing records and upcoming schedules to “project” the record of each team. Below are my projections of the teams remaining record with comments. Far below I project the final record based on the comments:

Houston – I have them going 8-2, losing to the Lakers and Utah. The other big / swing games are Houston at Phoenix (win) and Houston at Dallas (win, last game of year). I am hoping Dallas has locked in their seed by then and are resting players.

Utah – Projected 7-6. I think they have the hardest schedule left, taking into account the teams and their road schedule. I have them losing all of their road games except for Dallas.

Denver -  Projected 8-4. I have them losing 2 out of 3 road games to start off, and losing to Portland and Lakers at the end. The key for them are the 3 road games starting tonight. If they wind 2 out of 3 of those games they could come in 2nd place with a stumble from Houston or SA.

San Antonio – I have them going 9-4 the rest of the way, losing in Atlanta, NO, Utah and Cleveland. Some of the potential swing games are Portland at SA and SA at Indiana (both projected wins). If they stumble in one of those games they are in trouble.

Portland – I have them 9-3 the rest of the way, losing to SA, Houston and the Lakers. Huge games are with Houston and SA. If they win one of those games they will come in 2nd place.

New Orleans – I think they have the 2nd hardest schedule left, with them going 8 and 5 the rest of the way. I have them falling to Houston, San Antonio (once on road), Dallas, Utah and Miami. I think NO is one win short today for really contending for 2nd place, unless they get incredibly hot.

Projected Total Wins Losses based upon above analysis:

Houston 55,27

SA – 54,28

Denver and Port. – 53, 29

NO – 52,30

Utah – 50,32

Using Rotoworld and Simssport, I complied an excel spreadsheet with the cap information. I would be very interested to see if you all have different information.

Practice squad and rookies was a guestimate. Not sure about any dead money. It does not anticipate any free agents signing (like Adams), you can put your own numbers in there.

Ferguson looks he might need to restructure and Kosier could also be a cap hit if they think they can upgrade.

I have all the numbers (committments) through 2011.

Have fun!

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If you take out the NG Giants game as an abberation (new system, unsure cornerbacks, etc), the defensive stats for the Cowboys are impressive. On average they would be cumulative for games 2-4:

Total yds per game (253 per game, 2nd in league)
Time of posession (25 min. for opposing team, 35 for Dal)
Points per game (12.3, 5th in league)
Yards rushing per game (66, 3rd in league)
Net yards passing per game (166, 5th in league)
"reverse" qb rating, which is a more comprehensive way to measure the passing defense (62, 2nd in league)
Avg gain per passing play (5.3 yds, 6th in league)
Passing completion percentage(50%, 1st)

Pretty impressive, but one of the main things that helps the defense is the Dallas time of posession. 10 minutes per game is huge.

These cumulative stats may improve with the Buffalo game, may go down after the NE game.

Below are some good information about the Rams from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Jim Thomas. This entry is from Tuesday and today (Wednesday)). His overall theme is how conservative the play calling is, however he never can reconcile how one calls for long pass plays with a swiss cheese offensive line.

[EDIT] Please do not post full articles from other websites without permission from that site first. It's OK to post a small part of an article and discuss it, but please don't copy and paste a full article - unless it's a short one with a paragraph or two. And always include a link back to the original post. The article in discussion here can be found here. [END EIDT]

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