There’s plenty to fix in Dallas, to be sure. As with any team that’s sent home from the postseason earlier than anticipated, the list of things that the Cowboys hope to improve for 2022 is considerable. But when head coach Mike McCarthy starts ordering that list in terms of priority, there’s room for just one item to be the top concern.
Penalties were the first area of focus mentioned by McCarthy as he spoke to the media Tuesday at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. The Cowboys led the league last year (playoffs included) in flags thrown on them (168) and penalties actually assessed against them (141).
Those numbers speak to a lot of sloppy technique, mental errors, and discipline issues. McCarthy may not be the one called out by number when the referee keys his mic on Sundays, but make no mistake: penalties are a coaching problem.
But in the Cowboys’ case, it turns out bad luck played a significant role, too.
For starters, McCarthy acknowledges that while giving up 1,192 penalty yards over 18 games- an average of 66.22 yards per outing- must be corrected, he doesn’t feel the need for a wholesale change in philosophy, just the time spent on playing clean football.
“I believe in the format that we use, how we emphasize it, how we teach it,” the coach said. “Penalty prevention, the individual focus and the techniques part of it… that will be heightened.”
The challenge is that, thanks to CBA rules that determine a fixed amount of instructional time, hours spent dedicated to penalty prevention takes away from time spent practicing some other aspect of the game.
“I’m not making [an] excuse; your time with your team is less than it’s ever been in, I know, my time as a head coach. So where are you going to spend that time?” McCarthy asked rhetorically. “We will talk and emphasize penalties more than we have in the past.”
Of course, there is also a risk in overcoaching penalties, in fine-tuning players’ techniques so much that power, strength, and aggression start to suffer for the sake of not wanting to draw a flag.
McCarthy certainly doesn’t want that, either.
“Sometimes there’s a risk of being higher penalties when you want to be more combative, get your play style consistent for your whole team. I think that’s a process where [when] we’ve come out of year one and into year two was an emphasis for us because of our play style wasn’t consistently at the fever pitch that we wanted it throughout our team. And with that comes more combative penalties. History will tell you that; that’s been my experience as a head coach. Those are some things that are accepted part of doing business,” McCarthy explained, “but the pre-snap and the discipline penalties we have to be much better at. We did not, by no means, did we hit the target there. I’ve got to coach it better, we’ve got to emphasize it better. It will definitely be a heightened point.”
But as Michael Gehlken of the Dallas Morning News pointed out this week, some of the Cowboys’ penalty woes in 2021 can be attributed to luck of the draw. Bad luck, that is.
Officiating crews led by Shawn Hochuli, Scott Novak, and Alex Kemp all finished within the top three in the NFL last season for flags thrown per game.
Hochuli called two Cowboys games in 2021: the season-opening loss where he flagged Dallas eight times (to Tampa Bay’s 11) and the Thanksgiving laundryfest where he dinged Dallas and Las Vegas 14 times apiece, another Cowboys loss.
Novak worked two Cowboys games as well: Week 8’s win (11 Cowboys penalties to Minnesota’s seven) and Week 17’s loss (10 Cowboys flags to Arizona’s seven).
Kemp handled Week 14’s win, where Dallas and Washington were both hit with seven infractions. But he also helmed the mixed officiating crew for the Cowboys’ wild-card loss, flagging Dallas 14 times to San Francisco’s nine.
That’s one-third of the team’s 18 games with a notoriously flag-happy ref running the show, six games producing nearly one-half of the Cowboys’ assessed penalty calls for the entire year.
Compare that to Bill Vinovich. His crew called the fewest penalties in the league for the fourth time in five years. In his two 2021 run-ins with Dallas, he flagged the Cowboys just five times in Week 9 and a season-low three times in Week 16.
Cowboys players and coaches were quick to lay at least some of the blame for their losses to the Raiders, Cardinals, and 49ers on officials. It’s not that any refs have a legitimate bias against Dallas per se, but the team- unluckily, perhaps- did see more than their fair share of officials who have shown a blanket penchant for penalties.
Were Cowboys players guilty of that many more transgressions than everyone else? In part, yes. Left guard Connor Williams led the entire NFL in holding calls, with 11. That’s an issue that may resolve itself, with the otherwise highly-rated Williams about to hit free agency.
But McCarthy and his staff can (and need to) do more to make sure all the Cowboys players give those officiating crews- whoever they happen to draw on any given Sunday- less reason to throw flags in the first place.
To hear McCarthy tell it, that’s Job One this offseason.
[listicle id=692260]
[listicle id=693652]
[listicle id=693628]
[lawrence-newsletter]