Tag: cowboys penalties

Situational awareness could solve Cowboys’ biggest penalty issues

The Cowboys are a penalty-prone football team but by focusing on situational awareness they could cut out the most damaging flags. | From @ReidDHanson

The Cowboys are the second-most penalized team in the NFL this season. On near countless occasions ill-timed penalties on defense have extended opponent drives. Pre-snap penalties have needlessly set the chains back on offense and given up easy yards on defense. Overall lack of focus has made easy situations much more difficult and everybody knows, Dallas doesn’t need to make things any more difficult for themselves than they already are.

In many ways, the Cowboys are victims of their own foolishness. Penalties are often matters of discipline. Whether that blame falls on the players who commit them or the coaches who do/don’t hold them accountable, depends on who you speak to. Former Cowboys coach Bill Parcells didn’t think it was on him to reduce penalties:

“I don’t coach penalties,” Parcells said in 2004. “You’ve got to blame the players for the penalties.”

Given Mike McCarthy’s track record with penalties in the NFL, Parcells might be right. As Saad Yousuf pointed out in The Athletic, McCarthy’s Packers were 20th in the NFL in penalties during his tenure. Since coming to the Cowboys in 2020, his team is the second-most penalized team. Perhaps penalties aren’t a coach’s stat and really are based on the players.

Yet at some point someone has to drive home the message. Players need to understand the impact of their infractions and feel pressure to improve. If that pressure isn’t coming from their peers, then it has to come from the coaching staff.

The Cowboys currently lead the NFL in defensive offside, illegal motion, leverage, clipping and roughing the kicker penalties. While the pre-snap penalties are egregious and wholly inexcusable, it’s the drive extending penalties on defense that seem to hurt most – penalties that occur when the Cowboys are in an advantageous position, be it on third down, fourth down, or just have the offense backed up. They take a situation which would otherwise offer a change of possession and replace it with a fresh set of downs for the opponent.

Situational awareness seems to be missing from this team.

It may be too late in the season to fix certain technique issues and those lazy pre-snap concentration issues but what about situational awareness? When Rick Carlisle was coaching the Dallas Mavericks, he realized very quickly they’d never be the defensive juggernaut he wanted them to be. He decided to focus on situational defense for his offensive minded team. By identifying key moments and possessions of the game, he would pick his moments to light a fire and spark special attention to detail for his ball club. They didn’t need to be a good defensive team all the time, just at the right time.

Penalties have plagued the Cowboys all season long and with just two weeks left in the regular season, that isn’t likely to change. But is a little situational awareness too much to ask? Easier demands may provide more realistic results.

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Cutting Cowboys’ pre-snap penalties is easy way to fix big problem

The Cowboys are league leaders in pre-snap penalties in 2023; here’s why cutting these errors in concentration could make all the difference. | From @ReidDHanson

The Cowboys have a penalty problem.

With 108 flags thrown against them, they only trail Seattle among the NFL’s 32 teams. Of the 90 penalties officially charged to them (removing declined and offsetting ones), they are just one penalty away from the top spot. Their 764 yards against places them in the top-three most yards penalized.

It’s a leader list no one wants to be on, and a sign Dallas is often making things more difficult on both sides of the ball than they need to be.

Yet not all penalties are created equal. Some penalties are more damaging than others and some are unavoidable, perhaps even occassionally preferred. In the case of mismatches, sometimes a player needs to commit a penalty to minimize the damage.

For instance, a defensive holding call in the secondary might result in five-yards and an automatic first down, but if a defensive back is about to get torched by someone like Tyreek Hill or D.K. Metcalf, the penalty is probably worth it. A holding call by an OT may cost the offense 10 yards, but if an explosive pass rusher like Micah Parsons or Nick Bosa are on a collision course with the QB, a hold is probably worth it.

As long as there are elite players in the NFL and cunning coaches scheming to find mismatches, there are going to be unavoidable penalties.

17 penalty-game shows continuation of Cowboys’ undisciplined play under McCarthy

Saturday wasn’t an anomaly; the Cowboys have more total penalties over the past 2 years- McCarthy’s tenure- than any other team in the NFL. | From @ToddBrock24f7

After his Cowboys led the league in infractions in 2021, head coach Mike McCarthy promised that the main emphasis of the offseason, the thing that would get worked on most, would be penalties.

But following Saturday night’s preseason opener in Denver, Cowboys fans could be excused for collectively wondering if the coach knows that the goal was actually fewer penalties from now on.

The Cowboys were flagged 17 times against the Broncos, most in the NFL over the weekend’s worth of games.

While it was admittedly a meaningless exhibition contest (and a couple calls were notably questionable), the 129 yards conceded on those flags are emblematic of a bigger problem that just won’t seem to go away in Dallas.

“Penalties, clearly, are way too much,” McCarthy said after Saturday’s 17-7 loss, in which Cowboys gaffes led directly to 10 of Denver’s points. “We’ll look at those and keep going through it as far as combative [penalties] versus discipline [penalties]. That’s clearly the biggest negative.”

It’s been the biggest negative, actually, for McCarthy’s entire tenure in Dallas.

ESPN’s Get Up pointed out that the Cowboys have been flagged 266 times since McCarthy took over. That’s also the most in the league.

“Something is not being addressed,” host and former Cowboys defensive end Marcus Spears said on Monday’s show. “This has now become a Mike McCarthy issue. This ain’t about the preseason game.”

The coach, though, was quick to shoot down reporters’ comparisons between Saturday night’s flag-filled performance and anything that happened in 2021.

“This is preseason, and I don’t think this has anything to do with last year. Obviously you guys get to write what you want, but it’s a starting point,” McCarthy explained. “Yeah, I didn’t like the number of penalties, to make it clear. I talked about it at halftime and talked about it briefly in there [in the locker room]. We’ll take a long look at it.”

Defensive tackle Neville Gallimore was a fresh-faced newbie not that long ago; he remembers that first-game jitters are real, even in just a preseason matchup.

“It’s football season, so the levels are high and everybody is trying to compete and get after it. Obviously, that is something we’ve got to be better [at], and we will,” the third-year man said. “Shout out to the young guys; I know what it’s like: your first game, especially playing out here with such a crowd. I know their emotions are running high, but it’s one of those things that once the game got going, they were able to slow it down. I feel it is like that every year.”

Cowboys fans could say the same about that deja vu feeling when it comes to the officials getting as much face time as the players.

Referee Alex Kemp, who led Saturday’s crew in Denver, also officiated Dallas’s most recent game, the wild card loss to the 49ers in which he dinged the Cowboys 14 times.

The Cowboys worked with refs more than usual in the preseason in hopes of better understanding officials’ tendencies. Holding themselves to more of a gamelike standard in practice, the thinking was, would cut down on penalties called during games.

Saturday’s outing did not seem to validate that point, and the Cowboys coach was left looking, once again, for explanations as to why his team continues to shoot itself in the foot by being undisciplined.

“I was a little surprised they called that many penalties in Preseason [Game] One, but you need to go through that,” McCarthy said. “This will help us get ready. We’re draft-and-develop; this is what it looks like, unfortunately, sometimes. But we will be better from it. I have great confidence in that. I’ve done this my whole coaching career: I’ve always played a lot of young guys. Unfortunately, it starts like this.”

But even more unfortunately for the Cowboys over the past two seasons, it has also seemed to keep going like this, too.

It’s easy to blame youngsters’ inexperience. Or preseason rust. Or nitpicky officiating. Or one or two undisciplined players.

At some point, though, the constantly-pointed finger is going to swing back around to the one constant through it all.

“Ultimately, when you get to Week 3 and 4,” Spears said, “and you continue to see the same things, something is not being addressed. Either you need to replace this dude [who’s committing repeated penalties], or you’re not coaching it the way it’s supposed to be coached.”

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Travis Frederick on phantom tripping call: ‘I don’t understand the rule, evidently’

The Cowboys center was as perplexed as everyone else at the two tripping penalties called against Dallas in New England in the Week 12 loss.

Listen to any interview ever done with Travis Frederick, and it’s clear he’s a pretty cerebral guy. He was a National Honor Society member in high school, even graduating early so that he could enroll in a spring football camp at Wisconsin. While in Madison, he earned a degree in engineering mechanics with an emphasis in computer engineering. For his pregame warmup, the 320-pound center runs detailed wide receiver route trees with linemate Zack Martin. Quarterback Dak Prescott has called him “a genius.” Suffice it to say, he’s a smart dude. So to suggest that Frederick doesn’t understand one of football’s fundamental rules would border on absurd.

Yet the seventh-year veteran was quick to question his own football intelligence after an unusual tripping penalty was called against him late in the fourth quarter of the Cowboys’ 13-9 loss in New England.

“I don’t understand the rule, evidently,” Frederick told reporters after the game. “I need to get a clarification on that. When I tried to get a clarification on that, the umpire was nowhere to be found.”

The flag came on a 3rd-and-1 play, negating a first-down pickup by running back Ezekiel Elliott and leaving Dallas instead in a 3rd-and-11 situation that ultimately ended with a turnover on downs.

The tripping penalty is a rarity in the NFL, generally reserved for flagrant and obvious cases of a player flailing to bring another down while being desperately out of position. This was not that.

Even a by-the-book reading of the rule doesn’t really apply. As defined by the 2019 NFL Rulebook: Rule 3, Section 40, “Tripping is the use of the leg or foot to obstruct any opponent (including a runner).” Rule 12, Section 1, Article 8 makes tripping a prohibited act.

Did Frederick lift his leg as he shifted himself around to help double-team Patriots linebacker Dont’a Hightower? Without question. Was he attempting to trip Hightower? That’s a tough case to make.

And yet, the officials did. What’s more shocking? They did it twice.

Earlier, six-time Pro Bowl tackle Tyron Smith drew a tripping flag, too. It turned a 2nd-and-13 into a 2nd-and-23, effectively stalling the Dallas drive and leading to a punt that was blocked to give New England a short field (and eventually a touchdown) in the first quarter.

It turns out it has happened twice against the same team in the same game before, and it happened against Dallas, too.

One of the most seldom-seen penalties? Called against Dallas twice in the same game? Several Cowboys were understandably skeptical.

“I know it was my first time hearing the call,” wide receiver Amari Cooper told the media in the visitors’ locker room. “And then to hear it twice in one game, it was kind of… it was just different. I’d never heard that call. I don’t even know what it is. I’m guessing it’s tripping somebody? Like, putting your foot out and tripping them?”

“I mean, that’s been all season long, so it’s no surprise,” Prescott said during his press conference in reference to iffy calls working against the team. “It’s nothing new. As I’ve said before and I’ll continue to say, I’m just going to play the play. That’s my job; I’ll let those guys do their job.”

“I see the definition of whether you’ve made a move, and got your toe down,” owner Jerry Jones told a crowd of reporters, “Whether it’s tripping or not, I don’t want to go to those two particular tripping calls, if you will. I don’t want to go to that.”

Coach Jason Garrett was blunt in his reaction to the tripping flags after the game: “I’ve never seen that before.”

Most who were watching the game seemed to concur.

Even ESPN’s NFL officiating analyst weighed in.

That the penalties came in a game against the Patriots and coach Bill Belichick- with their history of leveraging every possible advantage- made the whole episode even more curious.

That theory calls to mind last season’s Week 7 game versus Washington, in which long snapper L.P. Ladouceur was flagged for a “snap infraction” on a late field goal try. The call moved the Cowboys back five yards; kicker Brett Maher missed the subsequent attempt, and Dallas lost the game. Then-Redskins coach Jay Gruden had reportedly gone to officials prior to the game and warned them to watch Ladouceur’s movements, the exact same ritual the veteran has employed in his snaps for 15 NFL seasons. Ladouceur went through his mechanics. The Redskins jumped. The flag was thrown. The Cowboys were moved backward in a critical moment.

It worked for Washington in 2018. And it’s certainly plausible that Belichick used the same strategy this past weekend in Foxborough.

Even if officials were badgered by a coach into seeing trips that weren’t really there, Frederick took the high road afterward.

“I don’t know how, exactly, the calls come out. I don’t know how that works, and we’re frankly not allowed to talk about the referees and their calls. It’s a call that was made, and you’ve got to try to put yourself in a better situation so that something like that doesn’t make a tremendous impact on the game. You’ve got to able to try and take those type of things out of the game altogether.”

Defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence said, as a defender, he knows what tripping actually looks like.

“I get tripped up every time,” Lawrence said in postgame interviews,  “but, I mean, it’s cool. I ain’t going to sit here and cry about it. If the refs want to call [expletive], let them call the [expletive]. It’s all about what we do… Everybody knows it was no such thing, that a foot was thrown out or anybody was tripped.”

“It’s all up and down,” Lawrence concluded. “They make the rules; we just play the game.”

After one of the rarest penalties in the sport was called on Dallas twice in the same game, it sure seems like the Cowboys weren’t the only ones playing games on Sunday.

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