Red Headed Genius

Like many of you, I was really impressed by the game called by Jason Garrett on Sunday.  In my mind, he was one of the causes for our disasterous outing last year.  It just seemed like he lacked the creativity to use all of the weapons he had.

I was reading this article by Bob Sturm, of Dallas area sports radio fame, and I now have a new appreciation for Red Jesus.  I know it's only the first game of the season, but from what I saw and apparently what shows on the tape that Sturm watched, Garrett has made a ton of progress this off season.  The innovations and schemes called by Garrett are pretty astounding.

A couple of interesting tidbits from the article:

How crazy is 52 plays for 462 yards? 8.9 yards per play. You may never see that again, so save the tape.

• I was impressed with the offense, but didn't realize that we were that good.

The other thing that I have learned in these last few years of my psychotic studying of Garrett’s trends is that he never falls into a pattern. He substitutes EVERY play (other than the 2 minute drill). Trust me, he does not have the same personnel Group on the field for 2 straight plays except on rare occasions. On Sunday, it took 45 plays for the Cowboys to run consecutive plays in their base offense with the same look. And, you could easily say that by that point of the game (late 4th Quarter) the Cowboys had iced away the contest and were merely trying to kill the clock.

• This explains why it looked why we were having problems getting lined up early in the game.  With so many substitutions, it's to be expected that we would have growing pains in the 1st game of the season.

He also talks a lot about the "12" offense and two tight end sets and reinforces a lot of what Rafael had to say about how much an impact Martellus Bennet had that didn't show up in his game day stats.

Another interesting bit of the article is the pass distribution list, which shows that Romo distributed the ball almost equally to Witten, Williams, and Crayton.  This is how we will make up for the loss of TO. 

Check out the article as there is all kinds of interesting facts in there.  Sturm does a good job of breaking down the film and the anatomy of plays and provides great insight.  It's kind of refreshing to have someone in the media that actually does their research.