Football Bytes: The Cowboys Get Mauled by Lions
Plus, Caleb Williams' improvement gives the Bears hope.
Welcome to Football Bytes — a spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 Cowboy Down
If anybody tells you they have the Dallas Cowboys figured out, they’re lying.
After laying an egg against the Saints at home in Week 2 and falling just short in a 28-6 comeback bid versus the Ravens a week later, Dallas went on the road and took care of business against the divisional-rival Giants, then handed the Steelers only their second loss of the season in primetime on Sunday Night Football. The ship seemed to be righted again in JerryWorld, the hype machine ready to run at full power.
And then Sunday afternoon happened.
Hosting the Detroit Lions, whom Dallas had beaten six times in a row dating back to the 2014 season — including a controversial 20-19 victory late last season — the Cowboys were favored by a point and a half in the Elo ratings1 and were looking to improve on their 65 percent playoff probability and 44 percent chance to win the NFC East. What they got, however, was one of the most brutal beatdowns in franchise history instead.
Detroit scored on each of its first five drives, opening up a 27-3 lead during the second quarter. Then they scored on each of their next four drives to begin the second half, widening the margin to 47-9 with roughly 13 minutes left in the game. At that point, the backups came in and played out the string, or else it could have been even worse — but as it was, the Cowboys underperformed their pregame Elo spread by 39.5 points, their worst game relative to expectations since 1985 and the third-worst in the team’s entire 65-season history:
The game provided plenty of other horrendous Cowboy stats to dig into, from Detroit’s 448-164 yardage edge through 3 quarters — per SportRadar data, the most lopsided margin suffered by Dallas through 3 quarters of a game since Week 8 of the 2011 season — to Dak Prescott posting his second-worst EPA (relative to an average starter) in a game of his entire career. It was as humiliating a defeat as I can remember the Cowboys taking at home on a national stage, and the Lions seemed to be enjoying every second of it.
The big question now is, where do the Cowboys go from here? Only one team who lost by 35+ at home during the regular season has ever won the Super Bowl — the 2020 Buccaneers, who lost 38-3 to New Orleans in Week 9 — and only one other team in that category even made the Super Bowl at all. Of course, it was the 1970 Cowboys, who fell to the St. Louis Cardinals 38-0 at midseason, then bounced back to win seven straight games after that point before losing to the Colts in Super Bowl V.
There’s still a 3 percent chance that these Cowboys join that group, with Prescott following in the footsteps of Craig Morton. And this team is so inconsistent that they might actually do it, their extensive history of losing early in the playoffs notwithstanding. But right now, it’s no sure thing (37 percent) that Dallas even makes the playoffs at all, a huge change from just a week ago — because losses like the one the Cowboys just suffered probably tell us a lot about a team going forward.
🏈 From a Cub to a Bear
A couple of games into the season, it sounded like everyone was immediately ready to write off Chicago’s 2024 No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams as yet another highly drafted QB disappointment — joining a club with Bryce Young, Trey Lance, Zach Wilson, Mitchell Trubisky, Carson Wentz, etc.2
Is it stupid to make those kinds of determinations after just a few starts? Yes, yes it is. But this is the NFL media we’re talking about here, and people need things to discuss, so… yeah.
In any event, all of that chatter looks especially silly now, because Williams has gotten progressively better as he’s played more snaps against NFL competition. That’s according to the raw stats — he went from averaging 133.5 YPG with a 0-2 TD-INT ratio and 2.68 Adjusted YPA through 2 games to 262.5, 9-3 and 8.23 ever since — as well as the eye test. Just check out some of the plays he made on Sunday morning against Jacksonville:
Now, we might point out that Williams’ schedule has gotten a lot easier over that span, too. He has yet to face a team that has an above-average defense in my SRS ratings, but his most recent pair of outings have come against the Nos. 31 and 32 ranked D’s in the NFL. So of course he’s going to have better success under those circumstances.
But Williams has played well even if we adjust his EPA for what his opponents usually allow per start against other QBs. He had the seventh-best start of Week 5 by that accounting, and the 11th-best start of Week 6 as well. (That’s after ranking third-worst in Week 1 and second-worst in Week 2.) So clearly he is getting better, and playing at an above-average level recently.
One thing I was curious about was how Williams compared with other young QBs who followed a similar arc in their first six career starts.3 So I gathered that data for every other quarterback at age 23 or younger since 1971, looking for QBs whose progression of games most closely resembled Williams’ (based on the smallest sum of squared differences against Williams’ game-to-game performances):
The most similar progression belonged to Tim Couch of the 1999 Cleveland Browns, which may not be exactly what Bears fans want to hear. Within a couple of games of this same point in his rookie year, Couch was back to struggling with up-and-down performances before missing the last game-and-a-half of the season with an ankle injury. However, the next four QBs on the similarity list were FAR better pros: Matt Ryan, Eli Manning, the underrated Neil Lomax and John Elway. Peyton Manning isn’t far down the list, either — all of which shows that this type of early arc is pretty standard for a highly-touted young QB.
And staying on that track is exactly what the Bears need. It’s no secret that, aside from the stray decent season from a Trubisky, Justin Fields, Josh McCown, Erik Kramer or Jim McMahon here and there, Chicago has pretty uniformly received substandard quarterback play throughout the Super Bowl era. Williams is supposed to change that, though that’s more of a long-term project. Still, any immediate improvement he shows is a great sign — and it boosts the 2024 prospects for a team with the potential to finish above .500 for just the second time since 2012.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
Vegas disagreed, to be fair, setting Detroit as 3.5-point road favorites.
And let’s be honest at this point… maybe sorta Trevor Lawrence? (But that’s definitely another topic for another column.)
Or in this case, “starts” as measured by whether the QB led his team in Action Plays during the game in question.