Did the offense improve from Kellen Moore?

[John813]

What's the criteria for a top 10 defense?

YPG? PPG?

For PPG top 10 Dallas faced the Bills, 49ers and Green Bay in the playoffs. Total PPG = 17.3 (10+10+32)

For YPG top 10 Dallas faced the Jets, Panthers, Patriots, 49ers, Bills and Dolphins. Total PPG = 23.5 PPG

And for defensive PPG the Jets were # 12 and Patriots #15. Dallas in top 10 for both.


To me, the 2023 offense struggled versus teams this teams offense has always struggled against. Physical front 7 that can apply pressure without blitzing. Edit: With the secondary having somewhat competent players.

Versus the 49ers, Dallas 3 last games, including 2 with Moore, were 17 points(21), 12 points(22) and 10 points.
With Moore, the offense still struggled.

The Bills they played last in 2019, but still looked offensively weak. With Moore being the OC. 15 points scored back then. 10 scored this year. And in 2019 it was at home. No wind/cold to deal with. Same HC in Buffalo, Sean Jihad McDermott.

The redzone offense this year did struggle. For as much flack Zeke got, some deserved, Dallas missed that 2 yards and a clould of dust runs down there. As Pollard/Dowdle couldn't move the pile.

I'm not defending MM playcalling, but to me there's more to the offensive struggles than who is calling the plays.

 

[cowboys5xsbs]

Kellen Moore was fired from the chargers for a reason. Good OCs aren't on their 3rd team in 3 years. Sorry he sucks stop defending bad coaches.

 

[khiladi]

100 percent it improved.

The real question is. How did Moore look with his scheme and a litany of stars in LA including a real franchise QB?

You clearly didn’t watch the Chargers by this comment…

 

[khiladi]

Kellen Moore was fired from the chargers for a reason. Good OCs aren't on their 3rd team in 3 years. Sorry he sucks stop defending bad coaches.

No, he was not. They actually were turning down interviews for him. When they got whom they wanted in Harbaugh, the most coveted HC for the league, he was clearing out the staff, bringing in his own guys, and Moore was then allowed to interview and he got a job in a second with the Eagles.

 

[cowboys5xsbs]

No, he was not. They actually were turning down interviews for him. When they got whom they wanted in Harbaugh, the most coveted HC for the league, he was clearing out the staff, bringing in his own guys, and Moore was then allowed to interview and he got a job in a second with the Eagles.

Allowed to interview is code for we are firing you so try and get a job.

 

[cowboys5xsbs]

This is the basic criticism you'll ever read from the riff raff. Just garbage baseless accusations. No facts.

The actual production of the offenses tell a different story. One where Moore's offenses didn't fold against better defenses like this one does.

12 points in a playoff game says otherwise

 

[khiladi]

Allowed to interview is code for we are firing you so try and get a job.

Do you understand English? He was NOT allowed to interview. The Chargers were REFUSING teams to allow him to interview as an OC, and this was after they interviewed him for the HC position. They only allowed him to interview once Harbaugh came. Harbaugh is being given complete control, which is why the Chargers also fired the GM. Harbaugh is picking his own OC.

 

[cowboys5xsbs]

Kellen Moore was never the problem.

McCarthy is coaching his last season in Dallas this year because of Dak, just like Garrett, Moore, and Linehan before him.

Dak puts people in unemployment lines.

Are you trying to imply Garret and Linehan were good coaches?

 

[DFWJC]

So what happened in LA?

Injuries across the board, including at QB

Having said that, I was indifferent about Moore.

 

[JBS]

Yes. What we needed was an offense that completely shuts down against top defenses. Good point.

Same. Didn’t do any worse. Qb always folds vs good defenses. That isn’t anything new.

 

[Coogiguy03]

Yes Kellen Moore was AWFUL. Those curls still give me nightmares.

And they continued this season too, why do you think on 3rdand 9 we got 6 yards??? lol

 

[Staubacher]

The problem is the limited in arm and brain QB. Both Moore and McCarthy have done their best turning that lemon into lemonade.

 

[khiladi]

Ya know, Kellen Moore (scapegoat), the guy who gave you the 2nd most productive offense in the league while he was here. We needed to improve on that.

Did we?

The overall points scored says yes, at least from 2022, but not against the better defenses. We were a front running bully offense. When we got smacked in the mouth we folded up shop.

-


Let's take a look at the PPG and efficiency numbers the Cowboys offense put up with and without Kellen Moore.

Was the offense better without him in 2023? Sure, they scored more points per game. But does that mean anything when those numbers were padded against bad teams and the offense struggled against good teams?

The Cowboys dropped in points per game when facing top 10 defenses and dropped dramatically in Redzone scoring this season.

People don’t know what they are talking about. The Chargers were actually 6th in pre-snap motion and Keenan Allen literally had the best year of his career. Mike Williams got injured and they basically never had their starting group of WRs playing together. The problems with the Chargers were everything other than Moore, including their starting Center going down and Herbert breaking his thumb and playing with a cast, so he had trouble gripping the ball. Their OL blocking with their left-over retread from Lombardi years coach, who had 2 years of experience, was awful. Akeler was washed and their RG was awful. Staley was the worst HC in the league and was on the hot-seat the whole year.

According to Cowboys fans, Moore doesn’t do pre-snap, which was proven wrong this year. The Cowboys on the other hand were bottom of the league in pre-snap with MM right before the snap and around middle of the pack pre-snap, by mid-season, when MM had to change his play-calling. This was AFTER the bye week, when the offense got input from Dan Quinn and the defensive coaches.

The Texas West Coast was NOT working.

There were also concerns through the first month of the season that while the Cowboys’ offense was good, it was too safe to be great. Through the first six games of the season, Dallas ranked 23rd in deep passing attempt percentage (throws traveling at least 20 yards in the air), at 10 percent. The teams around the Cowboys in this ranking almost exclusively field quarterbacks who are not good, whose team doesn’t trust them yet, or both. In Dallas, this resulted in Prescott posting one of the lowest turnover-worthy play rates in the NFL, which is significant, following last season’s interception spree. But his average depth of target ranked near the bottom of the league, and the offense stagnated accordingly.

Some of that came down to the context of games, but still, not ideal for a passer making $40 million a year in his eighth season.

Through the last four games, though, Dallas has jumped all the way to second in deep passing attempt percentage, nearly doubling their percentage. Prescott is sixth in average depth of target over this stretch; his percentage of turnover-worthy plays is actually lower. The offense has received a makeover, and Prescott is balling out of his mind, completing almost 71 percent of his passes during that span, while averaging 317.8 yards per game to go with 13 touchdowns and just two picks.

There are other, smaller changes in the implementation and execution. For one, Prescott is scrambling about twice as often, going from 23rd to 11th. He is certainly not going to be as frequent an option in the run game as he was early in his career, but he is adept at moving outside the pocket when a play breaks down and finding an open target. I consider him to be one of the NFL’s best passers on the run, and we just weren’t seeing much of that early in the season. Now we are. It helps that the offensive line is allowing less pressure post-bye week, too, but when a rusher does get near Prescott, he has looked more comfortable manipulating the situation and still getting the ball downfield.

We’ve also seen minor tweaks to the alignments and formations McCarthy and Schottenheimer are using. Dallas was league average last year in using “bunch” formations—three pass-catchers tightly grouped together—at 34 percent. Through the first six games of this season, the rate was 30 percent, good for 25th league-wide. Over the last month, it has shot up to 40, and the rank is up to 11th. Bunch formations are a simple way to create mismatches and confusion within the secondary, as defenders have to do a lot more guessing about which player or route they will be responsible for.

So, how did this all happen? The team website reported an interesting note about what exactly the team did during the bye week, sharing different personnel groupings engaged in what they call “across the hall” meetings, in which offensive players met with defensive coaches to better understand their tendencies. “Across the hall is one of the best things that we do,” Dak Prescott told Nick Harris. “Obviously, there’s not a lot of times that you have that you can implement that in your schedule. When they went in and dissected us from a defensive coordinator’s point of view and gave us some good things, it was just all around awesome.”

Even with the rigors of the weekly schedule, you’d like to think time could be made for this more often, even if there’s more to this turnaround than Prescott and offensive staff asking Dan Quinn and his crew, “What do you not like having to defend?” and getting a response of “Confusion as a result of motion, deep shots to speedy receivers, a quarterback that can escape pressure and accurately hit his target, and more variation in formations.” And, again, none of these changes ensure better offensive production. It’s also on the team to prove that this production can continue to hold up when the schedule toughens up again in 10 days, when Dallas plays Seattle to kick off a gauntlet that also includes Philadelphia (again), Buffalo, Miami, and Detroit.

https://www.dmagazine.com/sports/2023/11/dallas-cowboys-mccarthy-prescott-offense/

If anything, one could argue the league was completely caught off at first by the change in play-calling, but like past years, once the offense is figured out and you need the QB to make plays consistently, that’s where he really “shines” with his pick 6s. And most of these changes were not complex changes, but actually simplifying everything for Dak. Bunch formations for example don’t require processing the whole field.

 

[MajesticRey]

This is the basic criticism you'll ever read from the riff raff. Just garbage baseless accusations. No facts.

The actual production of the offenses tell a different story. One where Moore's offenses didn't fold against better defenses like this one does.

Moore’s offense folded against the 49ers in the playoffs. Nice try.

 

[khiladi]

The problem is the limited in arm and brain QB. Both Moore and McCarthy have done their best turning that lemon into lemonade.

Exactly…. In 2021, going into Denver, Dallas was 6-0 and were averaging around 35 PPG and had multiple 40 point games. Then as usual, the offense was figured out and Dak became Dak. What happened with MM is the play-calling drastically changed mid-season, so bad teams with mediocre defenses and with bad QBs in particular, were caught completely off-guard.

Tendencies get figured out given time. And that’s what happened by the end of the season. The offense looked bad, except against the Commanders who fielded the absolute worst defense in the league.

 

[MajesticRey]

No it didn’t. Dak threw INTs and couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn against the 49ers.

How did the rest of the offense do?

 

[Jumbo075]

Ya know, Kellen Moore (scapegoat), the guy who gave you the 2nd most productive offense in the league while he was here. We needed to improve on that.

Did we?

The overall points scored says yes, at least from 2022, but not against the better defenses. We were a front running bully offense. When we got smacked in the mouth we folded up shop.

-


Let's take a look at the PPG and efficiency numbers the Cowboys offense put up with and without Kellen Moore.

Was the offense better without him in 2023? Sure, they scored more points per game. But does that mean anything when those numbers were padded against bad teams and the offense struggled against good teams?

The Cowboys dropped in points per game when facing top 10 defenses and dropped dramatically in Redzone scoring this season.

I never thought the Cowboys made Kellen Moore a scapegoat. I think he and Mike McCarthy both wanted to call plays, and it was truly a mutual parting. The Cowboys greased the wheels to get Moore the OC job for the Chargers. I don't understand why people say the Cowboys made Moore a scapegoat. Maybe some fans on this comment board made Moore the scapegoat, but I don't think the Cowboys ever blamed Moore. Even McCarthy said that his statement about running the ball more was related to the 2020 seasons, not the 2021 and 2022 seasons when Moore was still calling the plays. And the Cowboys did run the ball more in 2021 and 2022.

I've never understood the need to place blame. It doesn't actually accomplish anything. I think Moore is still a rising star coordinator in the NFL, and is well thought of throughout the NFL. That is evidenced by the fact that it took the Chargers only a day to decide to hire him, and once Harbaugh was hired in Los Angeles and Moore was released from his contract, it took about a day for the Eagles to hire him. Frankly, I think the Eagles got better by hiring Moore, and the Cowboys were better this past season - mainly because of how McCarthy was working more directly with Dak Prescott.

One of the reasons the Cowboys need an really strong DC hiring is that Mike is still going to be more concentrated on the offense.

The Cowboys were blessed with two guys who are very good play callers. Each has their own strengths and drawbacks. Both of them have called offenses that led the NFL.

 

[jazzcat22]

NOT A DAK THREAD

 

[MountaineerCowboy]

NOT A DAK THREAD

Just curious, but how are we supposed to discuss offenses without talking about the most important player on an offense, the QB?

 

[jazzcat22]

Just curious, but how are we supposed to discuss offenses without talking about the most important player on an offense, the QB?

By doing just that, talk about the offense and if improved or not. Not by discussing individual players, to the degree where you all want to just do your usual stuff.