Tag: 2020 outlook

Under former head coach Jason Garrett, the Dallas Cowboys rode a roller coaster of an existence. As an interim hire in 2010, the team rebounded from a 1-7 start under midseason-deposed Wade Phillips, to a 5-3 finish under the man who was hired as OC before the head coach. Garrett’s water then found its level, with the club finishing 8-8 for three consecutive seasons.

Just as Tony Romo started to solve the quarterbacking Rubik’s Cube, his health started to go for good and a 12-4 campaign in 2014 was followed by 4-12 when he only finished two games and subsequently saw the team luck into his replacement in Dak Prescott. The club has won more than they lost since then, by a wide margin, but in the last three seasons failed to approach the greatness of Prescott’s first campaign in 2016 that finished 13-3. A return to 8-8 with Garrett and his staff existing without a safety net ended with their dismissal and the hiring of Mike McCarthy.

There are numerous micro explanations and statistical forays into what went wrong and what could correct things, but the tried and true edict that close games in the NFL are a coin flip rings true in Dallas more than any other city.

The team’s roller-coaster results travel along tracks hammered into the ground with regression-to-the-mean stakes. When looking ahead to 2020, progress in close games seems logical, almost promised.

ESPN’s statistical savant Bill Barnwell recently dove into which teams should improve from their 2019 selves and which should backslide, and he went into great detail as to why the Cowboys are one of the teams that should zoom past their previous-season win total. The reasoning, the close-game swings.

The Cowboys were plus-6 in one-score games in 2018 and minus-5 in those same games in 2019. That’s an 11-game swing over the course of two seasons. Since 1989, just five other teams have dealt with an 11-win swing or more in close games, one of which will be appearing later in this column. To get something resembling a significant sample, we have to expand a bit and consider the teams that had a negative swing of eight games or more. When teams typically undergo that sort of swing from year to year, what happens in the third season?

They almost always improve. Of the 27 teams that fell off by eight or more wins in close games, 23 improved the following season, while one stayed at their prior record and only three declined. Three of the four teams that didn’t improve either replaced their quarterback by choice or via injury, including last year’s Panthers, who got only two injury-hampered games from Cam Newton. The 27 teams improved by an average of 2.7 wins the following year and won just over 46% of their close games. Dallas should be better in those one-score games in 2020.

In a nutshell, Barnwell discusses how teams that are lopsided on one side of the curve tend to swing to the other the following year, and the 2019 Cowboys were already an example of this.

The 10-win 2018 team was not all they were cracked up to be, as witnessed by a late-season road shutout to Indianapolis, an in-retrospect gift from Seattle’s run-first, run-last script in the Wild-Card game and then a drubbing at the hands of the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round.

Out of the Cowboys 10 wins, an astounding eight of them came in close games, with the club finishing 8-2 in games decided by one score. That record plummeted to 0-5 in 2019. Again, the NFL has proven year over year that close game records are not indicators of team strength; blowout wins are.

The Cowboys finished 8-3 in games decided by multiple scores.

Cowboys Wire’s weekly EPA power rankings (exquisitely compiled by Dan Morse) consistently showed Dallas’ ceiling as high in 2019.

The team was a top-5 passing club and a top-5 rushing club by expected points added (EPA). They entered Week 17 ranked sixth in opponent-adjusted EPA before throttling Washington by 31 points.

They were the first team since the 1989 Bengals to finish +100 in scoring differential and fail to win at least nine games.

As Barnwell points out, the team should improve on their record, even if their offensive dips slightly.

With better luck, Dallas would project as one of the best teams in football, given that it was one of those teams a year ago. If anything, it wouldn’t shock me if the Cowboys actually were a little worse on a play-by-play basis and still improved their record anyway. . .

This sounds like a simple concept, and I’m sure longtime readers aren’t hearing anything new when I say this, but the simple reality of the NFL is that the easiest way to find which teams are likely to improve or decline the following season is to look at their record in close games.

Garrett finished his time in Dallas with a 85-67 overall record, but 42-36 in games decided by seven points or less. While McCarthy was in Green Bay, where he won a Super Bowl and finished with a career mark of 125-77-2, he was 48-40-2 in one-score contests. The win percentages in close games is similar (.538 for Garrett, .545 for McCarthy), but in two-score-or-more games, McCarthy’s had much better success (.675 to .581).

The obvious rub here, is that the Cowboys are faced with the daunting task of working in a new system under the cloud of Covid-19. McCarthy hasn’t had any of the regular teaching sessions afforded new head coaches, and instead went until late July before having any semblance of official interaction with his draft picks, free agents and returning veterans. Missing rookie camps, OTAs and minicamps may not be a death sentence to expectations, but it seems reasonable their loss will make the terrain much more difficult to travail.

If those hurdles can be overcome though, simply by playing the percentages the Cowboys should be in a great position to progress past average and into a contender’s role.

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