Yakuza Rich
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Dallas vs. Miami Game Preview
by Yakuza Rich
http://yakuzarich.blogspot.com/
DALLAS COWBOYS (-4) VS. MIAMI DOLPHINS
AT DOLPHINS STADIUM
SEPTEMBER 16, 2007, 4:15 PM EST
WHEN DALLAS IS ON OFFENSE
Last Sunday versus the Giants the Cowboys attacked the deep middle left vulnerable by the Giants zone coverages, particularly their Cover 2 zone, with getting tight end Jason Witten on their linebackers. Perhaps predicting that the Giants would focus their efforts early on Terrell Owens, Jason Garrett mostly utilized Owens as a decoy in the first half by having him run a lot of deep routes, mostly go’s and fades which helped stretch the defense and open up space in the middle for Witten. The plan worked extremely well as the Giants simply couldn’t keep up with Witten and when they started to make some changes, Owens started getting motioned more and the Giants simply couldn’t keep up with him working the slot and running more crossing patterns.
Since Nick Saban was named the Dolphins head coach, the Fins have planned on moving to a 3-4 defensive scheme. In 2006 they hired long time 3-4 coach Dom Capers to be their Defensive Coordinator. And then when Saban quit the team, they wound up hiring Cam Cameron, another long time proponent of the 3-4 defensive scheme. But despite that they are still a 4-3 team mainly because they have good longtime front seven personnel, particularly DE Jason Taylor and MLB Zach Thomas, that are not really meant for the 3-4 scheme.
Against the Commanders last week the Fins played a lot of Cover 2 to keep the deep ball away from Skins receiver Santana Moss. It worked pretty well, but they struggled against the run and while Antwaan Randle El’s numbers are a bit inflated by a fluke-ish hail mary catch, he still had one of his better games as a receiver.
Expect the Cowboys to attack the Dolphins in the same manner, except that it may be a much tougher matchup for Jason Witten because the Miami backers, particularly Thomas, are much better in coverage than the Giants backers. And given that it’s a road game and Thomas’ cover skills, they may actually use Witten as a decoy early on and find ways to get Owens involved early to get the offense going. And given the success Randle El had, Crayton may be majorly involved as well.
The Dallas O-Line played quite well last week as they only allowed one sack and had over 100 yards rushing at 4.7 yards per carry. The ability of the O-Line to fend off Giants defenders led to much of Witten’s success as the Giants tried to use multiple zone cover shells to stop Witten, but it’s pretty apparent that if Romo gets adequate time, he’ll usually carve up zone coverage. But while the O-Line played well, the Giants D-Line was banged up, tired, and didn’t stunt. I don’t expect a lot of stunts out the Miami O-Line either, but it’s something that eventually an opposing coach will test them on.
The general consensus is that the Dolphins have a very good run defense, but they finished 9th in run defense DVOA in 2004, 10th in 2005, and 23rd in 2006. While the Commanders were thought to have a good running game going into the year, the 191 yards rushing they had last Sunday against the Fins may just be a sign of things to come for the Miami defense.
What I liked most about the O-Line last week is it finally showed that it could be effective running the ball left and right. As great as Jason Taylor is, he may be part of the issue as the Fins finished 16th on defending runs towards the left offensive tackle last season. But what I saw in the Commanders game showed the Skins mostly running the ball to the right side against the Fins and with good success. The Taylor versus Flozell Adams matchup will be an interesting one. The good news is that Taylor is the type of defensive that usually doesn’t give Adams too many problems. Taylor is a great athlete, but Adams usually struggles with extremely fast outside rushers or guys with great motors. It’s not a knock on Taylor, but he’s more or less a great overall athlete who uses his absurdly long arms to get an advantage on most left tackles. Given Flozell’s size, it’s probably going to be difficult for Taylor to use those arms to his advantage. But that being said, Dallas fans know to well that sometimes you just don’t know which Flozell Adams will show up.
Obviously the Witten vs. Thomas and the Taylor vs. Adams matchups are key, but the Fins are weak at cornerback and just lost starting safety Yeremiah Bell for the season due to injury. If Witten is negated by Thomas and Owens is negated by safety help over the top, expect Garrett to find ways to take advantage of whomever is covering Crayton and perhaps using a 2 TE set with Fasano to get a mismatch on Bell’s replacement Tavaris Tillman. If Taylor starts getting the advantage on Flozell, they’ll start giving Flozell help or probably start running right at Taylor to keep him on his heels.
WHEN DALLAS IS ON DEFENSE
From a scheme and philosophy standpoint, we pretty much saw what we expected from the Phillips 3-4. I didn’t go over it with a fine tooth comb, but in my game charting I could at least 24 blitzes from Phillips (22 of them were 5 man rushes). That was 36% of the defensive downs which was what he averaged last year with San Diego. But he was equally aggressive with stunts as I also counted at least 12 stunts. Put it this way, I honestly don’t think Dallas stunted that much all of last season and that’s not an exaggeration.
There wasn’t really much in the way of defining the Dolphins offense from watching the Skins game. They definitely do not feel comfortable with their O-Line, so speedsters Tedd Ginn, Jr. and Chris Chambers were mostly relegated to running short and intermediate routes. Ideally Cameron would like to have an offensive scheme much like Garrett has right now as they both come from the Norv Turner offense, but he certainly doesn’t have the same amount of talent so he’s restricted in what he can do. If there’s one thing similar to the offense he ran in San Diego it’s that he wasn’t afraid to have running back Ronnie Brown catch passes out of the backfield, which is something the Chargers still love to do with Ladanian Tomlinson. The Giants hardly challenged Bradie James in coverage. James looked better than he did all of last season, but he still needs to be challenged in coverage to see if he’s back to his form in 2005.
I expect better tackling from Dallas as they probably haven’t tackled that poorly since the 2004 season and usually when a team has one bad week of bad tackling, they usually turn it around the next week. The real interesting key will be to see how close the corners play the receivers. In the Giants game they were giving up too much cushion and it made their Giants three step drop passes to easy to execute. Wade Phillips seemed to hint they got more cautious in coverage mainly due to the problems they had early on. That may change this week as Wade certainly seems to be a guy that will go back to the style he wants to play sooner or later. This isn’t a knock against Parcells, but usually Parcells would need a lot of convincing to change his mind on a similar situation.
PREDICTION
I actually think the Fins match up pretty well against the Cowboys. Their front seven could very well give the offense fits. But the offense has two burners at wide receiver and that’s still a major concern for the defense at this moment. And if they can’t get anything off their receivers, they can still go to Brown as a receiver and possibly get a big advantage against our weak cover linebackers. This may be the time we see the dime package with Roy as the dime backer come into effect as he may be assigned coverage on Brown.
I doubt the Cowboys will put up huge points against the defense and I see improvements on defense, but don’t expect an effort filled with sacks and forced turnovers. Cowboys win somewhat comfortably, but it’s not close to being a blowout or anything like that. It’ll probably disturb fans a bit, but they probably forget how tough it is to win on the road in the NFL, especially to win big.
YR’S PREDICTED SCORE: Dallas 23 Miami 14
by Yakuza Rich
http://yakuzarich.blogspot.com/
DALLAS COWBOYS (-4) VS. MIAMI DOLPHINS
AT DOLPHINS STADIUM
SEPTEMBER 16, 2007, 4:15 PM EST
WHEN DALLAS IS ON OFFENSE
Last Sunday versus the Giants the Cowboys attacked the deep middle left vulnerable by the Giants zone coverages, particularly their Cover 2 zone, with getting tight end Jason Witten on their linebackers. Perhaps predicting that the Giants would focus their efforts early on Terrell Owens, Jason Garrett mostly utilized Owens as a decoy in the first half by having him run a lot of deep routes, mostly go’s and fades which helped stretch the defense and open up space in the middle for Witten. The plan worked extremely well as the Giants simply couldn’t keep up with Witten and when they started to make some changes, Owens started getting motioned more and the Giants simply couldn’t keep up with him working the slot and running more crossing patterns.
Since Nick Saban was named the Dolphins head coach, the Fins have planned on moving to a 3-4 defensive scheme. In 2006 they hired long time 3-4 coach Dom Capers to be their Defensive Coordinator. And then when Saban quit the team, they wound up hiring Cam Cameron, another long time proponent of the 3-4 defensive scheme. But despite that they are still a 4-3 team mainly because they have good longtime front seven personnel, particularly DE Jason Taylor and MLB Zach Thomas, that are not really meant for the 3-4 scheme.
Against the Commanders last week the Fins played a lot of Cover 2 to keep the deep ball away from Skins receiver Santana Moss. It worked pretty well, but they struggled against the run and while Antwaan Randle El’s numbers are a bit inflated by a fluke-ish hail mary catch, he still had one of his better games as a receiver.
Expect the Cowboys to attack the Dolphins in the same manner, except that it may be a much tougher matchup for Jason Witten because the Miami backers, particularly Thomas, are much better in coverage than the Giants backers. And given that it’s a road game and Thomas’ cover skills, they may actually use Witten as a decoy early on and find ways to get Owens involved early to get the offense going. And given the success Randle El had, Crayton may be majorly involved as well.
The Dallas O-Line played quite well last week as they only allowed one sack and had over 100 yards rushing at 4.7 yards per carry. The ability of the O-Line to fend off Giants defenders led to much of Witten’s success as the Giants tried to use multiple zone cover shells to stop Witten, but it’s pretty apparent that if Romo gets adequate time, he’ll usually carve up zone coverage. But while the O-Line played well, the Giants D-Line was banged up, tired, and didn’t stunt. I don’t expect a lot of stunts out the Miami O-Line either, but it’s something that eventually an opposing coach will test them on.
The general consensus is that the Dolphins have a very good run defense, but they finished 9th in run defense DVOA in 2004, 10th in 2005, and 23rd in 2006. While the Commanders were thought to have a good running game going into the year, the 191 yards rushing they had last Sunday against the Fins may just be a sign of things to come for the Miami defense.
What I liked most about the O-Line last week is it finally showed that it could be effective running the ball left and right. As great as Jason Taylor is, he may be part of the issue as the Fins finished 16th on defending runs towards the left offensive tackle last season. But what I saw in the Commanders game showed the Skins mostly running the ball to the right side against the Fins and with good success. The Taylor versus Flozell Adams matchup will be an interesting one. The good news is that Taylor is the type of defensive that usually doesn’t give Adams too many problems. Taylor is a great athlete, but Adams usually struggles with extremely fast outside rushers or guys with great motors. It’s not a knock on Taylor, but he’s more or less a great overall athlete who uses his absurdly long arms to get an advantage on most left tackles. Given Flozell’s size, it’s probably going to be difficult for Taylor to use those arms to his advantage. But that being said, Dallas fans know to well that sometimes you just don’t know which Flozell Adams will show up.
Obviously the Witten vs. Thomas and the Taylor vs. Adams matchups are key, but the Fins are weak at cornerback and just lost starting safety Yeremiah Bell for the season due to injury. If Witten is negated by Thomas and Owens is negated by safety help over the top, expect Garrett to find ways to take advantage of whomever is covering Crayton and perhaps using a 2 TE set with Fasano to get a mismatch on Bell’s replacement Tavaris Tillman. If Taylor starts getting the advantage on Flozell, they’ll start giving Flozell help or probably start running right at Taylor to keep him on his heels.
WHEN DALLAS IS ON DEFENSE
From a scheme and philosophy standpoint, we pretty much saw what we expected from the Phillips 3-4. I didn’t go over it with a fine tooth comb, but in my game charting I could at least 24 blitzes from Phillips (22 of them were 5 man rushes). That was 36% of the defensive downs which was what he averaged last year with San Diego. But he was equally aggressive with stunts as I also counted at least 12 stunts. Put it this way, I honestly don’t think Dallas stunted that much all of last season and that’s not an exaggeration.
There wasn’t really much in the way of defining the Dolphins offense from watching the Skins game. They definitely do not feel comfortable with their O-Line, so speedsters Tedd Ginn, Jr. and Chris Chambers were mostly relegated to running short and intermediate routes. Ideally Cameron would like to have an offensive scheme much like Garrett has right now as they both come from the Norv Turner offense, but he certainly doesn’t have the same amount of talent so he’s restricted in what he can do. If there’s one thing similar to the offense he ran in San Diego it’s that he wasn’t afraid to have running back Ronnie Brown catch passes out of the backfield, which is something the Chargers still love to do with Ladanian Tomlinson. The Giants hardly challenged Bradie James in coverage. James looked better than he did all of last season, but he still needs to be challenged in coverage to see if he’s back to his form in 2005.
I expect better tackling from Dallas as they probably haven’t tackled that poorly since the 2004 season and usually when a team has one bad week of bad tackling, they usually turn it around the next week. The real interesting key will be to see how close the corners play the receivers. In the Giants game they were giving up too much cushion and it made their Giants three step drop passes to easy to execute. Wade Phillips seemed to hint they got more cautious in coverage mainly due to the problems they had early on. That may change this week as Wade certainly seems to be a guy that will go back to the style he wants to play sooner or later. This isn’t a knock against Parcells, but usually Parcells would need a lot of convincing to change his mind on a similar situation.
PREDICTION
I actually think the Fins match up pretty well against the Cowboys. Their front seven could very well give the offense fits. But the offense has two burners at wide receiver and that’s still a major concern for the defense at this moment. And if they can’t get anything off their receivers, they can still go to Brown as a receiver and possibly get a big advantage against our weak cover linebackers. This may be the time we see the dime package with Roy as the dime backer come into effect as he may be assigned coverage on Brown.
I doubt the Cowboys will put up huge points against the defense and I see improvements on defense, but don’t expect an effort filled with sacks and forced turnovers. Cowboys win somewhat comfortably, but it’s not close to being a blowout or anything like that. It’ll probably disturb fans a bit, but they probably forget how tough it is to win on the road in the NFL, especially to win big.
YR’S PREDICTED SCORE: Dallas 23 Miami 14
