One of Week 1’s big storylines for Cowboys fans was the regular-season unveiling of Dan Quinn’s revamped defense. In coming to Dallas this year, the new coordinator brought with him fresh faces, a re-tooled scheme, and the promise of improvement over 2020’s dreadful unit. The club made defense a focus of the offseason, spending eight of their 11 draft picks on talent on that side of the ball. And the first test of all of it came on opening night against the defending world champions and their high-powered offensive attack.
Cowboys fans wanted a change. They sure got it. Looking at the snap counts from Thursday’s 31-29 loss to Tampa Bay shows a definite changing of the guard at the team’s hotly-contested linebacker position. First-round pick Micah Parsons was on the field for 78% of the defensive snaps in his first real NFL game. Keanu Neal, who came from Atlanta to reunite with Quinn and switched from safety to linebacker in the process, got 77%, just one less play.
Veterans Jaylon Smith and Leighton Vander Esch, though, each received less than a quarter of the total snaps on defense.
Cowboys defense was on field for 65 snaps Thursday vs. Buccaneers. Snap distribution for linebackers:
Micah Parsons, 51
Keanu Neal, 50
Jaylon Smith, 16 (25%)
Leighton Vander Esch, 14 (22%)
Jabril Cox, 0Parsons and Neal are primary nickel LBs, limiting Smith and LVE’s usage.
— Michael Gehlken (@GehlkenNFL) September 10, 2021
Were those snap counts- at least in part- simply the appropriate response to what head coach Mike McCarthy likes to call “the ebb and flow of the game?” Undoubtedly. The Bucs threw the ball 50 times in what was expected all along to be an aerial shootout, and Parsons and Neal were listed as the nickel linebackers for Week 1.
“It depends on the game,” McCarthy said Friday. “Game plans are really game-plan specific.”
And this game plan included 2018’s most-feared linebacker duo in the league sitting on the bench for three-quarters of it. It was a stark reversal of fortunes for both linebackers; Smith played nearly 98% of last year’s defensive snaps and had started 50 straight games before Thursday, and Vander Esch was on the field for 42% of 2020’s snaps, even despite missing much of the season due to injury.
“There’s a lot of potential left in this team,” Parsons told reporters following Thursday’s game. “There’s so much. We’re young, too; we’ve got a mixture of young guys mixed in with the old guys. I think we’ve got a chance to be a really good defense. A damn good defense.”
The old guys. Smith and Vander Esch are just 26 and 25, respectively. But, as he showed in camp, the 22-year-old Parsons seems to play at a different speed, one that renders all other Cowboys defenders in near-slow-motion.
It’s already hard to imagine an offensive game plan- from any opponent- that would put flip the snap counts to have Parsons standing on the sideline watching Smith and Vander Esch resume their former workloads.
McCarthy talked about how the night’s situational approach impacted the veteran pair’s playing time.
“I think they understand, if you just look at the big picture,” the coach explained. “Personally, I can’t speak on their behalf. If they weren’t frustrated, I’d be disappointed. These guys have played a lot of football throughout their whole career. But it’s our focus to be better as a whole as a defense, and frankly, the more players that you play, the better off you’re going to be.”
That means giving the bulk of the snaps to the best player at the position, and it’s taken astonishingly little time in Dallas for Parsons to establish himself as exactly that.
The rookie logged seven tackles Thursday night, with one pass defensed and a quarterback hit in his regular season debut.
“I thought it was a good start for him,” McCarthy said. “I think he’s beyond his years. He’s still a rookie. It’s the first time he played in an NFL game, and also, the communication responsibility that he has to handle: that’s a new experience, I don’t care where you played or how much time you get in the preseason. I thought he got off to a good start.”
But he wasn’t perfect. Brady and the Bucs got him turned around a few times, with at least one national outlet going so far as to suggest- unfairly, it turns out– that Parsons was in over his head.
it’s called ROBOT (roll over and back) technique. The linebacker’s first responsibility is run, and if once he sees pass he backpedals he’ll never get there so he’s taught to turn and run and find crossers. He doesn’t get there but not “completely lost” https://t.co/W3p15M6xQ6
— Chris B. Brown (@smartfootball) September 10, 2021
“He’s got a very bright future,” McCarthy continued on Parsons. “I’m very confident that he’ll continue to grow. I thought he looked comfortable. I liked the way our young guys played. They made some mistakes, and that’s part of it. I’ve done this a lot; I’ve done it throughout my whole coaching career. We’ve always played young guys going back to ‘06, and you have to swallow hard sometimes because they get in spots and it may not be clean for them. They’re a step slow. So, you have some of that. But our young guys are into the game. It wasn’t too big for anybody. I loved the way they went about it. And that’s the first step.”
As for the rookie, he says he’s too focused on his job to be thinking about whose snaps he might be taking away.
“I’m thinking about what I can do to get off the field, what I can do to create a turnover and impact,” Parsons told reporters after the Week 1 loss. “Just doing my one-eleventh on that field and doing exceptionally good at it. That’s what I’m thinking about. Not letting those guys down, because I know when they’re out there, I want them to do the same thing.”
But if the Cowboys’ Week 1 usage of Parsons is any indication, those guys may not be out there all that often anymore.
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