Micah Parsons says he knew when the Eagles knew it was over.
Despite being thoroughly dominated in every facet of the game through the first thirty minutes on Monday night, Philadelphia could still have made it a one-score affair when they fielded the kickoff to start the third quarter at AT&T Stadium.
But three snaps later, Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs jumped in front of a Jalen Hurts pass and raced 59 yards to the end zone. The pick-six extended Dallas’s lead to 27-7. With over 28 minutes still to play, that one takeaway took away whatever wind might have been billowing around in Philadelphia’s sails. And Parsons saw it happen.
“As soon as Diggs had that pick coming out of the half, I saw their whole energy [go] low, the whole momentum shifted,” the linebacker-turned-defensive-end told reporters. “I mean, when you’ve got contagious energy, everybody’s just excited to see each other make those types of plays, it’s hard to come back from that. That’s one thing I like about this team: everybody can eat. It’s not just one person out there making plays; it’s a whole bunch of people making plays.”
And the Cowboys defense has a whole bunch of turnovers to show for it.
Dallas currently leads the league with eight takeaways after three weeks. Dating back to Week 14 of last season, as David Moore of the Dallas Morning News notes, it’s been seven games straight that the team has forced two or more turnovers, the longest active streak in the NFL. It’s a remarkable reversal for a unit that found takeaways so hard to come by for much of last season.
But defensive coordinator Dan Quinn doesn’t chalk it up to lucky bounces, and he sure doesn’t subscribe to that old chestnut about turnovers coming in bunches.
“No, I don’t really accept it. It’s a good thing to say when you don’t have any: ‘Oh, they’re coming, just hang in there,'” Quinn said this week. “I say no, pedal downhill right now and go get more. There were absolutely chances for us to have the ball more [Monday]. I think this is an example of trusting your training. These guys, assistant coaches and the players, put in a tremendous amount of work on pre-practice JUGS machine, post-practice JUGS machine, ball drills, fundamental work. So I think this is a byproduct of really trusting your training.”
It’s a philosophy. A mindset. A state of being, almost. Something the Cowboys defense consciously works on day in and day out. And now it’s manifesting itself on gameday.
“That’s kind of our game plan; we want to pin our ears back, force the offense to throw the ball. We feel like we can create a lot of turnovers right now,” remarked Anthony Brown, who made an interception to end Philadelphia’s first drive Monday night. “That’s what we pride ourselves on. So we want the offense to do what they’re doing, and we’re going to do what we do.”
Turns out, it’s what the Dallas defensive backfield was specifically constructed to do.
“Our focus in the offseason was we felt we needed to improve the ball skills in the secondary,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said this week. “I think we knocked it out of the park in that area with our personnel department and the guys we brought in here.”
Cowboys now have a league-leading 8 takeaways this season. Trevon Diggs has 6 interceptions in 15 career games pic.twitter.com/rahx2iOjBl
— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) September 28, 2021
“If you look at our secondary and our pass rush, we are built for pressure on the quarterback. We’ve got guys, when they get their hands on the ball, they are going to intercept the ball.”
Safety Damontae Kazee has one of the team’s six interceptions through three weeks. He’s one of a couple players who came from Atlanta specifically to reunite with Quinn in a revamped, ballhawking defense.
Quinn knows deep down that his unit likely won’t maintain this pace. Eight takeaways in three games extrapolates out to about 45 over a 17-game season. No team has cracked 40 (in a 16-game season) in 8 years; Quinn’s 2013 “Legion of Boom” in Seattle managed 39. And this Cowboys crew isn’t in that tier quite yet.
But the coordinator knows his players can keep putting themselves in the right spots through repetition during the week. Turnovers may not come in bunches, but they do come to those who work at being able to get them.
“You don’t get them all the time,” Quinn explained, “but you want to put yourself in position to have a mindset to do it and at practice. You’ve got to go take your chances and say, ‘Is this a play I can go make and be in the right technique to do that?’ So there is a little testing you have to go through at practice.”
That testing leads to all kinds of good things happening when it’s gametime, whether it’s deflating an opposing sideline with a fortuitously-timed defensive score, or simply handing the ball back to the offense so they can impose their will the old-fashioned way.
“For them to take the ball away, that’s giving us another chance. Kind of like stealing a possession,” running back Ezekiel Elliott commented when asked about how the offense views the defense’s thefts. “If those guys keep taking away the football the way they are, we’re going to be in a good spot this year.”
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