Starting fast -

[TheDude]

I have long championed quick starts and getting up early on the other team. Historically this team rarely ( I believe 1 time in 2012) scored 2 TDs (>13 points) in the first half. The winning % when a team in the NFL scores >14 is greater than 75%.

Having an efficient offense also helps the defense as the other team will press more and perhaps become more 1 dimensional (ie.. like the cowboys have had to be).


That said, I ran across the this BTB article and the last 3 paragraphs were very well put:

" I understand the strategy, particularly as it pertains to keeping Romo upright for 16 games. But playing close games is the football version of Russian roulette. I'll conclude with an extended quote from my article last November:

The second "luckiest" sport is NFL football. Why? The number of players and how often they are on the field (basketball players log far more minutes that hockey or football players, thus skill plays a larger part); sample size (there are so few games in a football season, and so many fewer possessions than in, say, basketball, that there are fewer opportunities to bleach out luck and randomness); the way the game is scored (a team can be very successful and have nothing on the scoreboard to register that success - or play very poorly but get a couple of lucky bounces and have a lead).

Because of these factors, goofy plays - tipped passes, fumbles in heavy traffic, long touchdown passes wherein a defensive back slips after having solid coverage - have more value. Unlike sports with a lot of games (baseball) or many more possessions (basketball) or fewer players on the field, court. or rink, the weird plays in football factor more heavily in the final outcome. [Because football is the most "random" of professional sports in terms of chance occurrences that contribute to winning or losing, teams will tend to hover around .500 in close games, regardless of overall winning percentage.] With this in mind, what distinguishes a good team is not that it has "heart" and wins close games, but that it's good enough to blow out a fair amount of opponents, thus limiting the number of games it can lose due to a bad bounce, questionable penalty or blocked field goal at the buzzer.

http://www.bloggingtheboys.com/2013/9/16/4735258/quick-take-cowboys-chiefs-by-the-numbers

 

[CATCH17]

Defenses know what we're going to do out of the gate and through out the game.

Basically our offense is designed to go where the defense supposedly has a soft spot.

So don't expect this to change with any consistency in the Jason Garrett era. Teams know what we're going to do.

 

[Direwolf63]

Sometimes it seems like Jason Garrett gameplans around keeping the score as tight as possible and try to kick the winning FG as the time moved to zero. It seems like the idea of having a 3 TD lead makes him uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the Lions game that did this to him.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

I don't believe we keep the games close because of any sort of plan. We keep the games close because we don't execute well enough to get big leads.