Tag: cowboys running backs

It’s Week 11, and Cowboys’ McCarthy just named his lead RB

From @ToddBrock24f7: Rico Dowdle has quietly surpassed two RBs with 7 Pro Bowl nods between them to land in the top-20 in a couple key rushing stats.

The Cowboys’ rushing attack has been a debilitating weakness all season, with the team ranking 31st out of 32 teams in rushing attempts per game, rushing yards per game, and rushing yards per carry with the season now more than half over.

The team’s running-back-by-committee approach has been the primary contributing factor in the eyes of most observers. The Cowboys split carries among Ezekiel Elliott and Rico Dowdle to start the season, finally called up Dalvin Cook only to have him turn in very pedestrian numbers, and they feed Deuce Vaughn and Hunter Luepke so sparingly it’s easy to forget they’re still on the team.

Of the five, only the fullback Luepke has taken offensive snaps in every game of the 2024 campaign, with the Dallas coaching staff unwilling to further commit to any of their other backfield options.

Except, maybe, now.

When asked Thursday about Dowdle, head coach Mike McCarthy- in Week 11 but for the first time this season- said out loud what most of Cowboys Nation has been thinking for months.

“He’s the lead back,” McCarthy said during a pre-practice press conference, “I thought he had a really good first half [versus Philadelphia], and I think that’s really illustrated by the attempts. Rico needs to touch the ball.”

Dowdle’s 10 carries for 50 yards in the first and second quarters of Sunday’s 34-6 loss to the Eagles represented his busiest and most productive first half of the season. And while the game getting away from the Cowboys in the third stanza slowed down the 26-year-old’s stats, Dowdle has quietly managed to climb his way up the rankings of several key categories among the league’s rushers.

At an average of 4.5 yards per carry, Dowdle currently stands 19th across the NFL, ahead of flashier names like Joe Mixon, Alvin Kamara, David Montgomery, Najee Harris, Breece Hall, and even ex-Cowboy Tony Pollard.

Filter running backs by success rate, and it gets even better. That metric calculates how often a ballcarrier gains at least 40% of the yards required on first down, 60% on second down, and 100% on third or fourth down.

Dowdle’s success rate of 55.4% puts him 10th in the league. That kind of clip makes his limited usage- just 83 rushing attempts (36th place) and only 374 rushing yards (35th place)- seem like outright negligence on the part of the Dallas coaching staff.

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Many have blamed that reluctance to let Rico run on some assumed mandate from the front office to lean on Elliott, the two-time rushing rushing champ, fan favorite, and prodigal son who returned to the team in 2024 after an obvious decline led to his release in early 2023. Elliott is having a career-worst season production-wise and has reportedly been enough of a distraction that he was made inactive and left in Dallas for a Week 9 away game.

Cook was signed late in the preseason but stashed on the practice squad until Week 8. While the hope was that Cook would be some sort of savior by providing fresh legs midway through the schedule, his performance has only emphasized why the Cowboys should have made a bid during free agency for Derrick Henry, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, or the aforementioned Mixon (all top-10 rushers currently).

Vaughn simply doesn’t look like a legitimate NFL running back (and that’s not a cheap shot at his height), and Luepke was never meant to be a volume rusher.

Dowdle is the lead back in Dallas… but not only because the team has no other choice (save for the practice squad’s Malik Davis, who hasn’t logged a carry since the finale of the 2022 regular season). Though he’s had to claw for every snap and even stand by during an unexpected inactive declaration in San Francisco due to a mystery illness, Dowdle, the undrafted free agent out of South Carolina, now leads the Cowboys- and by a lot- in rushing attempts and rushing yards. And he’s top-five on the team in receptions and receiving yards, too.

It’s shaping up to be a lost season for the Cowboys, but with eight games still left to play, it’s become clear that Rico Dowdle will be one of the keys to whatever glimmers of success the team is able to eke out.

And now, it seems, that’s finally clear enough for McCarthy to say out loud.

“Got to get him the ball,” the coach said Thursday. “That’s my focus, just continue to give him opportunities.”

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‘Not on our radar’: Jerry Jones in full denial over Cowboys’ RB situation

From @ToddBrock24f7: The Cowboys’ ground game has been very poor through the first 2 games of 2024, but Jones claims no one but “some media” is worried about it.

Jerry Jones simply doesn’t see a problem. And he can’t understand why the question keeps coming up.

The Cowboys owner made his weekly call-in to Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan on Friday, and he went into full-blown denial mode when asked about the team’s current running back situation.

“This is a little bit of a first for me,” he told the K&C Masterpiece show on Friday, “because I’ve never seen such made of our position and what we’re doing at that position- running back- this year and not having done this or not having done that at running back.”

The Cowboys found themselves in quite a pickle over the offseason in regard to the ground game. Tony Pollard was deemed too expensive to keep and was allowed to leave in free agency. Rather than pursue one of several high-profile rushers on the open market, the Cowboys instead brought sentimental favorite Ezekiel Elliott back on a cheap one-year deal.

Then the club opted not to look to the draft for any new talent at the position, deciding to go into the regular season with a committee that also included Rico Dowdle, Deuce Vaughn, and Hunter Luepke. Dalvin Cook was added late in the offseason, but he has yet to make it off the practice squad after a summer of working out on his own.

Given all that, the results on the field have been predictably lousy.

Over two games, only eight teams have fewer rushing attempts than Dallas’s 46. They have just 170 rushing yards; only six teams have amassed fewer. They are tied for the sixth-lowest yards-per-carry average (3.7) in the league. The team’s biggest ground gain of the season so far is 12 yards, tying them with two other squads for the shortest long run.

Elliott and Dowdle are dead even for the team lead with 56 yards each, but that puts them in only 49th and 50th place among all ballcarriers leaguewide. In fact, they both rank lower than every other club’s top rusher, and 17 teams- more than half the NFL- have two rushers ahead of them on the yardage list.

Yet Jones was blunt: he’s not even thinking about bolstering the group.

“Running back is just not on our radar as far as an area of interest,” he snapped.

The 81-year-old went even further, claiming that no one in his circle of influence is even discussing the running back position as a concern.

“I don’t have anybody else in the world asking me about this but some media,” Jones offered. “A few of the media have gotten out here and written some stories early about how we’re going to go with a running back in the draft or how we need a running back, and they’re trying to cover their you-know-what as we go through the season.”

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He summarily dismissed the idea of activating Cook from the practice squad (and not for the first time this week), saying, “I don’t know that that will happen.”

And he sounded perfectly content to stick with the rushing attack he has now, despite the uninspiring numbers posted above.

So Sunday’s Week 3 contest will feature Elliott on one sideline, with the Ravens’ Derrick Henry on the other. The Cowboys could have made a move to acquire Henry in the offseason, and most observers- including Henry himself– thought it would have been an ideal match.

Instead, Henry comes to town wearing Baltimore purple with a significantly better yards-per-carry average this season (4.2) than Elliott and Dowdle, and more rushing yards (130) than Elliott, Dowdle, Vaughn, and Luepke combined.

But in Jones’s mind, Henry and Elliott are basically the same.

“Both of these guys came out at the same time,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty good contemporary of our competition this week in Zeke Elliott. I’m pleased with what Zeke is doing.”

The emperor in Dallas has no clothes. And the Cowboys have no running game.

And the man in charge can’t- or won’t- admit it.

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Cook will help Cowboys ‘play wide open,’ per McCarthy, but don’t discount Dowdle

From @ToddBrock24f7: McCarthy is OK with RB-by-committee, but the 15k yards between Dalvin and Cook and Ezekiel Elliott won’t leave Rico Dowdle out of the mix.

The addition of four-time Pro Bowl running back Dalvin Cook may have muddied the waters, at least in terms of projecting which ballcarrier will get the lion’s share of the workload in Dallas this season.

But to hear head coach Mike McCarthy tell it, that’s kind of the point.

Cook will start out on the Cowboys practice squad as he acclimates himself to the playbook and ramps up to game speed after working out on his own all spring and summer. But the team clearly has plans for him on Sundays, and he’ll eventually join a platoon that already includes two-time rushing champ Ezekiel Elliott, a resurgent Deuce Vaughn, and Rico Dowdle, who many observers have said looks like the best back of the bunch this offseason.

“What’s the definition of ‘committee?'” McCarthy asked reporters during a Thursday press conference. “As a play caller, you want to play wide open- first, second, third down- and you want it to flow. My definition of ‘committee’ is: it’s a long year. You want to be able to have distribution throughout that position because of the toll that it takes on the running back position.”

As for which one opposing defenses see in the Dallas backfield, McCarthy explained, it will all depend on the moment.

“We don’t want to necessarily be in personnel groups that every time this particular player runs in or this particular player runs in [the defense knows what’s coming]. After three or four weeks, you have major tendencies,” he warned. “We want to be able to utilize all those guys but stay in a normal flow.”

The late signing of Cook- just 12 days before the season opener in Cleveland- does throw a wild card into how the Cowboys’ running back committee has looked in camp and the preseason. But the coach confirmed that signing the former second-round draft pick- who’s had four 1,000-yard campaigns in seven NFL seasons- was no spur-of-the-moment impulse purchase.

“There’s been interest for quite some time,” McCarthy said. “Personally, I’m a fan. I’ve seen him run down the sideline from the opposite side of the field too many times. He’s just a hell of a player. I think when you just look at our roster additions this year, we’ve added some veteran experience- more than we’ve had in the past- and he’s a great example of it.”

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But pairing Cook with Elliott- the two have combined for over 15,000 career rushing yards and seven Pro Bowl nods- should in no way leave Dowdle, who has a grand total of 385 rushing yards after four injury-filled pro seasons, as the odd man out.

McCarthy readily admits that the undrafted South Carolina product will see “a lesser role” only on special teams this year, and that’s because the plan is for him to play more in the Cowboys offense.

“I think I definitely should get a bigger role this year, and I’m looking forward to it,” Dowdle said after Cook’s signing, per The Athletic‘s Jon Machota. “The more you can do, the better. When you can catch out of the backfield, run routes, and also run the ball well, it’s hard to take you off the field. I want to be a three-down back.”

And being in a timeshare with two longtime workhorses doesn’t worry Dowdle in the least.

“One guy is not going out there, being on an eight-play drive, staying eight plays in a row or something like that,” he said. “It’s kind of flipping it: four and four, having a third guy come in, just making sure we have fresh legs on the field at all times.”

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‘We’re running back by committee’: Cowboys’ McCarthy confirms timeshare for Elliott, Dowdle, others

From @ToddBrock24f7: McCarthy says Zeke looks the same, but his role will be different in 2024. The coach has certainly run his share of past RB committees.

The Cowboys currently have eight running backs on the roster. As the veterans and rookies practice together for the first time, there are plenty of questions about which one will be the primary ballcarrier for 2024.

According to head coach Mike McCarthy, the answer is: none of the above.

“We’re running back by committee,” he told reporters at the conclusion of rookie minicamp.

Two-time rushing champ Ezekiel Elliott is back with the club and obviously the most experienced of the bunch. And while McCarthy claims that, so far, “it’s like he picked up right where he left off,” the coach seemed to confirm that the third-leading running back in franchise history- who turns 29 in July- won’t be logging 230-plus carries this year, as he had in each of his three previous seasons under McCarthy in Dallas.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” McCarthy said. “That’s not going to be his role.”

McCarthy acknowledged that modern NFL offenses have largely moved past the days of the bellcow feature back. And he certainly remembers those days well. He was on the sidelines in Kansas City for the last five years of Marcus Allen’s Hall of Fame career. In New Orleans, he gave Ricky Williams 561 carries in two seasons and then gave Deuce McAllister 945 over the next three. And he wasn’t shy about calling Ryan Grant’s number 312 times one year in Green Bay.

But despite putting Elliott in the league’s top 10 in rushing attempts every season from 2020 to 2022, McCarthy will be looking at Rico Dowdle, Royce Freeman, Deuce Vaughn, Hunter Luepke, Malik Davis, Snoop Conner, and UDFA Nathaniel Peat to help shoulder some of the Cowboys’ load this year.

“Seventeen games is lot of football, that’s a big role for those guys,” McCarthy explained. “Don’t get me wrong; they’d all like to carry it like the old days and have those touches, but you want those guys fresh at the most important time of the year.”

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How the workload will actually be split, of course, remains to be seen. But McCarthy has definitely run his share of committees, too. In 2022, Elliott and Tony Pollard had a 54/46 percentage split in carries. Eleven seasons prior, Ryan Grant and James Starks had an even closer division of labor: 134 and 133 carries, respectively, for a McCarthy-led Green Bay team that finished 15-1.

And his 2016 Packers saw eight different players tally double-digit rushing attempts, with nobody tallying more than 80. That RB room included Starks, Ty Montgomery, Eddie Lacy, Aaron Ripkowski, Christine Michael, Don Jackson, and Knile Davis… and bears a strong resemblance to the veritable sampler platter of backfield options Dallas plans to work with this summer.

Green Bay went 10-6 that season, earned a wild-card berth, beat the favored Cowboys in the divisional round, and made it to the NFC Championship.

Most Cowboys fans would be thrilled with an outcome like that in 2024, even if it means needing a program to keep track of who’s running the ball at any given time.

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