First, let's start with the defense
Its painful to watch but relevant. If you look at the running plays, the Packers are frequently running the same blocking scheme that has killed the Cowboys for a while. All of the linemen immediately go one direction. There is no pulling or complicated scheme. What is happening here is that defenders are trying to hold their gap as the gap rapidly moves to one side. With the size limitations of the defenders involved, eventually one of the gaps opens and Jones is free to pick it. GB isn't running plays into specific holes as much as just letting Jones go where the defense isn't. This isn't new. Teams have been doing this and it worked. There are fixes for this, like putting 8 in the box, 5 linemen, etc. and but I have seen no effort by Quinn to fundamentally change the tactics to address this weakness.
The issues with the team for some reason starting the game in a soft zone have been well documented. I have no idea why this was tried, much less why Dallas kept doing it when it obviously was not working.
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When Dallas was on offense, GB didn't copy recent teams. I'll give them credit. They sat down and figured out a good number of Dallas' plays at a fundamental level. Dak has publicly commented that they were changing at the snap. If you have followed him all year, what Dak does is he gets a pre-snap read and that tells him which side of the field to throw to. He then usually has a single high/low read leading to a quick throw. This has been the offense all year and for the most part, it worked well. What GB did is figured out a way to
break Dak's read progression. That's why he had the deer in the headlights look. The offense is set up for quick throws off 1 2 reads. Again, like the defense, there are fixes for this that can be done with playcalling and personnel. McCarthy didn't do anything and just kept feeding the players into the meatgrinder.
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Before the game, McCarthy was quoted as saying something to the effect of "you do what got you here". Quite frankly, this is reminiscent of a lot of Garrett's philosophy of just line up and beat your man. On offense, the team seemed to have absolutely no game specific plays or plans. McCarthy seemed to be treating it like a preseason game while LaFleur had prepared like it was the super bowl.
I do not blame the players nearly as much as others here do. I didn't see a ton of fumbles or missed assignments or dropped balls leading to a loss. Dak wasn't air mailing balls 10 feet over people's heads. They were put in a bad situation tactically and were not prepared to play. The NFL is a coach's league in that regard. GB took guys like Parsons and CeeDee out of the game which is possible when the Cowboys staff just sits on their hands and ignores the game being played in front of them.
I think McCarthy has done some good things in Dallas. Same with Quinn. That said, they both seem to have the same fundamental flaw in that they are not great preparers or in game coaches. If their base tactics don't work or things start going against them, they are powerless to change things up. This was a knock against them prior to their time in Dallas and it all came together on Sunday. This was also a knock on Garrett, who also was no tactical or game preparation genius.
As others have said, this all eventually falls back on Jerry but I'll be specific about it. Jerry doesn't know enough about football apparently to evaluate if the coach talking in front of him knows what he is talking about. As a result, he just falls for their lines about "analytics" hook line and sinker. Dallas is going to keep falling into the same trap as a result. Until the cowboys have a disciplinarian head coach backed up by tactically smart assistants, they will always fall short.
Relevant old article that really shows how brain dead Jerry is regarding coaching:
https://www.espn.com/blog/dallas-co...lls-2005-cowboys-staff-has-seventh-head-coach
