ARLINGTON — Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott has always been someone who welcomes pressure. He doesn’t shy away from blitzing; he encourages it — for good reason. Prescott, according to Pro Football Focus, entered Sunday with a league-high 1,256 passing yards when under pressure this season. That was 270 yards more than the next closest player.
That was also before he faced the Minnesota Vikings and the creative mind of defensive coordinator Brian Flores.
“If Dak is having a problem with it, then let’s give them kudos for having a great blitz,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. “Because Dak knows how to see it, knows how to see it coming and certainly has the experience to react against it.”
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Which made Minnesota’s defensive performance all the more impressive.
Prescott was under siege in the Cowboys’ 34-26 loss to the Vikings. He was hit 11 times and sacked twice. He completed a season-low 60.5% of his passes and failed to throw a touchdown pass for only the third time this season. Perhaps most striking was the team’s lack of success on third downs. The Cowboys only converted two-of-12 attempts, meaning they had to settle for six field goal attempts.
“Brian Flores was better than me today,” Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer said, “and I won’t sleep very good tonight, but I promise you, I’ll wake up tomorrow. I’m gonna work my [butt] off, and I’m gonna figure it out.
The Cowboys expected exotic blitz looks from Flores and the veteran-laden Minnesota Vikings defense. They didn’t expect to be mystified, however.
“It was just a revolving door of trying our answers,” Prescott said.
But ultimately failing to find solutions.
To the Cowboys’ credit, this was expected. They gave credit all week to Flores and his ability to formulate a defensive gameplan. Cowboys offensive coordinator Klayton Adams said earlier this week that Flores will run plans that the Vikings haven’t shown on film, hoping to catch an opposing offense off guard.
“You’ve seen it in the past where he’s going into a game with a [cover-zero] pressure that’s worked early in the game on a younger quarterback,” Adams described, “and then it’s just bang, bang, bang, bang, and he keeps calling it. So you have to have answers for whatever they’re doing.”
And if you don’t — bang, bang, bang, bang.
Coincidentally, it was Flores’ cover zero looks that gave even a 10-year veteran in Prescott problems. It didn’t help that the Cowboys often found themselves in third and long. For a hungry defense like Minnesota, it looked like hunting season.
Cover zero means that the opposing defense is running man coverage without any safeties over the top. In essence, it’s a boom-or-bust approach, with the hope that a blitz can overpower an offense’s protection before receivers can get open downfield. The problem with playing the Vikings was how hard it was to recognize who would be blitzing and where they would be blitzing. Multiple times, Minnesota lined up with eight guys at the line of scrimmage and only three players in coverage.
The Cowboys didn’t know exactly how Flores would disguise his blitzes and his coverages, but they trusted their instincts heading into the game. They have rules for how they adjust pre-snap to looks or how they decide to attack a defense at a given time. They hoped focusing on themselves would be enough to overcome whatever Flores threw at them.
“It’s not necessarily hard to make the decision. You’re just hoping it works out,” said Prescott, who threw for 294 yards against the Vikings, marking the second-most passing yards a quarterback has had against them this season. “When it doesn’t work out, that’s when I guess you second-guess yourself and go to the other decision, and when that doesn’t work out, you try the third one, and then that doesn’t work out. It’s easy to make the decision. It’s easy to make the call and get up there. But the execution is a whole different aspect of it, and that’s where we weren’t good enough tonight.”
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Prescott, just like he has against pressure throughout his career, didn’t shy away from the truth about Sunday’s performance against the Vikings. He said they had a plan that ultimately wasn’t good enough. Routes designed to beat man coverage were unsuccessful. Once Flores found a crack in their protection, he exploited it, over and over again. And the Cowboys’ answers to it were stymied over, and over again.
“I’m frustrated,” Prescott said. “This is one of the toughest ones I’ve ever been a part of.”
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