Rod Marinelli has forgotten more about defense and football than anyone on this forum and more than anyone else in Dallas, so I always hesitate to make snap judgements that might look foolish the next year, but.......................
I agree, he's got to go!
I get the base defense and the philosophy of bend but don't break and make teams earn those points by executing on long TD drives, but ****** man, we're going down the crapper week after week, watching our season drift away, and that prick won't take a chance and blitz!
Sometimes when you have a team backed up on it's goal line, it's worth selling out and trying to make them punt to midfield. Sometimes, the blitz rushes a QB into a poor decision or an errant throw that becomes a turnover; sometimes the QB or the RB get drilled for a fumble; sometimes the blitz brings about a holding call.
Even on the high school level, we hated playing inferior teams that would sell out and blitz a lot because you might win on big plays, but you had to count on those big plays because they never let you get into your comfort zone of x's and o's and just executing or following a game plan, so until you had a nice lead, you were nervous as hell. Never in the history of the Dallas Cowboys, not even when we had Ed Jones, Harvey Martin, and Randy White did we ever blitz as seldom as we do now. Not only does it mean the offense can just sit back and stick to the game plan they came in with, nickel and diming us up and down the field, the QB standing in the pocket all day at times, but they also know on every play what their damn run game blocking assignments are. We don't make the QB audible; we don't make the line change their blocking; we don't even pretend to show blitz and back out of it.
Why isn't McClain blitzing? At least it would get his lazy slow butt out of everyone's way and occupy a blocker!
Where's the safety blitz? We used to occasionally line both safeties up over the center and one would back out at the snap, making a delay in the C/G knowing which guy to block, and sometimes we'd send both...sometimes they'd both drop back in coverage, but then the middle of the OL was late giving help to the the other guys. When Scandrick went down, we abandoned the Corner blitz altogether!
Blitzing isn't just about sacking the QB or even rushing him into mistakes or incompletions, it also mucks up the running game; it makes the OL, RB, TE, WRs, and QB come to the line on every play looking for certain players, wondering if it's coming from here, there, or nowhere. It creates doubt. Yes, the greatest QBs beat it and make plays. But it also creates 3 and outs and turnovers.
It's every freakin' week we just sit in that vanilla base defense, maybe trying to disguise coverage in the secondary, but when there's little pass rush, that disguise effort ends up hurting us more than the offense as guys are late getting to their areas. I'm not looking at data, but I'm betting Marinelli blitzes less than 5% of the time and at the bottom of the league. You've lost 6 games in a row, but you've been close in all but one, and he won't even blitz the dang Eagles when they're gassing our defense up and down the field!
I love the 4-3, and I think we do have on paper the best defenders we've had in while right now, with a mixture of young guys who may turn it on in the next couple of years. It's time to bring in a young guy who is somewhere between the Ryan brothers' "blitz till it kills one of us" and Marinelli's "the base defense works if everyone does his job perfectly and my rushmen beat the OL" mentalities.
I don't feel the same way about the offense. Romo is still our QB for the next 2-3 years at least, and I seriously doubt that he wants to change the offense that he can now run in his sleep. It's been infuriating this year with our backups, but when Romo returns with Dez, this offensive system is still our best option.
