The Dallas Cowboys had the luxury of plugging in future Hall of Famer Jason Witten at tight end for nearly two decades. Even in the twilight of his career in Dallas, when he had lost more than a step, at least he was a known quantity.
When Witten left town for the Las Vegas Raiders, there was legitimate excitement around Blake Jarwin providing something his predecessor had run out of long ago: juice. Unfortunately that juice lasted all of 24 plays in 2020. The 25th took Jarwin’s ACL and a year of his career with it.
What the Cowboys now face is complete uncertainty at the position, and the results through one week aren’t promising as ESPN’s Bill Barnwell did his best Chris Hardwick impression and singled out Dalton Schultz’s Sunday night performance for providing mere peanuts in his snaps during the season opener. Schultz’s two drops and his depth on the fourth down attempt were akin to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown right before the kick.
The job of the deeper crossing route on mesh is to set the depth of the shorter route working underneath it. In a fourth-and-short situation like this, they wanted both crossing routes to be past the sticks so that their receivers could each run their routes and catch the ball at or past the first-down marker. Schultz, running the deeper crossing route, needed to run his route one yard past the sticks to leave Lamb enough space to run his crossing route at the sticks. Instead, as you can see from the NFL Next Gen Stats play animation below, Schultz ran his crossing route three yards deep, forcing Lamb to run his route two yards downfield, one yard short of the sticks.
27 tight ends saw at least three targets in Week 1. According to Football Outsiders, Schultz is ranked No. 24 in DYAR and no. 26 in DVOA, and the mesh play isn’t even a consideration in those efficiency metrics. He was easily one of the worst tight ends to garner significant playing time.
This isn’t to say that Schultz can’t still be an upgrade over what Witten would have been able to produce. It’s to highlight the new normal for the Dallas offense. A world in which the tight end play may be maddeningly inconsistent.
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