At one of my many jobs, I read a lot of football content looking for news that’s worthy of putting into the fantasy football world’s public eye. One thing that caught my attention last week was a line in Saad Yousuf’s four-week check-in on the Cowboys from The Athletic:
The running back situation has been as confounding as it has been disappointing. The Cowboys are starting to drift away from a pure committee approach, in the sense that Rico Dowdle’s snap counts and rush attempts are noticeably greater than Ezekiel Elliott or Deuce Vaughn’s.
Sure enough, after starting the season opener, Elliott totaled 25 snaps against the Ravens and Giants. This was before Dowdle got 20 carries to Elliott’s six in the Cowboys’ win over the Steelers on Sunday night. It’s easy to see why. The Cowboys are getting a successful run—defined as 40 percent of the yards needed on first down, 60 percent on second down, and 100 percent on third or fourth down—on 40 percent of Elliott’s carries. With Dowdle, that number jumps to 57 percent.
So of course it was a well-sourced thought that Dowdle would take over sooner than later. Yousuf is a good reporter, after all. But what I found most interesting was another line he wrote about Elliott:
There may be value that Elliott brings to the Cowboys — leadership, locker room camaraderie, pass protection — but it has not been in the form of purely running the football.
Any talk about the Cowboys’ running game begins with the acknowledgment that, yes, it’s been bad: Dallas’ 3.5 yards per attempt is the second-lowest in the NFL, and they’ve yet to have a 100-yard rusher in a game this year. It also must acknowledge Dowdle becoming a kind of solution is partly rooted in Ezekiel Elliott—a franchise stalwart, a terrifying runner in his day, perhaps a worthy Ring of Honor guy down the road—not doing very much.
At this stage of his career, Elliott is a sledgehammer. He has produced no open-field yards this season, per FTN Fantasy’s charting numbers. When the defense has stacked the box, Elliott has averaged—wait for it—minus-one yards per carry. Elliott is hardly the only player struggling in the rushing game: Vaughn has been a nonentity, and nobody is overpursuing any of Dallas’ end-arounds to Brandin Cooks, Kevontae Turpin, or CeeDee Lamb. But Elliott had the biggest role of all of the strugglers, and per NFL Pro he is generating minus-1.1 yards over expected per attempt. Quite simply, Elliott is a fullback cast in the role of a running back. Good blocker, some Larry Centers vibes with how impressive he is as a receiver. But just too slow to be effective at 29.
Enter Dowdle. Against the Steelers, the Cowboys produced their second 100-yard rushing game of the season, with Dowdle contributing 87 yards. He doesn’t show up well in advanced stats. In fact, per NFL Pro, his rush yards over expected against the Steelers was zero. But what he does offer is the ability to be explosive—four runs of more than 10 yards to Elliott’s zero—and enough speed to press holes rather than having to rely exclusively on vision in zone runs.
Having to adjust to Zach Martin getting beat on a block to the outside, Dowdle dives inside on this run play. This is where an Elliott play would end. Instead, Dowdle shows enough stretch to get east and west off a cut, and enough burst to get to the outer edge of the defense before going out of bounds.
I’m not suggesting Dowdle will be a savior for the run game. Certainly, his fumble at the goal line on the game-winning drive against Pittsburgh could have been disastrous. The fact he has emerged as the feature back shows where the Cowboys are as a franchise. They decided that Elliott and Vaughn and Dalvin Cook were “enough,” so much so that Cook, who is probably washed but at least is an option, hasn’t played a snap. The fact that Dowdle is comfortably the best back in the room should be an embarrassment to the decision-makers on this team, as should the choice to bring Elliott back.
Some of this is less about the Cowboys than a league-wide overreaction to the running back’s place in 2024. We’re in an era where it has become trendy to crap on the position and blanch at the idea of paying serious money to anyone who plays it, even as the best still make real differences. Look no further than New Orleans and Baltimore, who beat Dallas so badly with 29-year-olds Alvin Kamara and Derrick Henry that I had to do a postmortem on whether the run defense was salvageable. (The early verdict: apparently!) Just because Elliott aged badly after that monster extension in his first Cowboys tenure doesn’t mean every other running back will.
In any event, the Cowboys need Dowdle to produce a higher success rate. Dak Prescott is second in the NFL in passing attempts. Some of that is because he’s good at passing. Some of that is because the Cowboys created massive negative game scripts against New Orleans and Baltimore, forcing them to throw more. But more than anything it’s an admission that the Cowboys can’t trust their running game. Even against the Browns in a game in which they quickly established a firm lead, Prescott dropped back 35 times to the team’s 25 runs.
Prescott has already faced 35 snaps on third-and-long (third-and-7 or longer) this year, eighth-most in the league. And because the Cowboys have not surrounded him with the greatest receiver talent in the world—especially now that Cooks is sidelined—he has a minus-46.4 percent DVOA on those attempts. His output has been nearly 50 percent worse than the average quarterback in those situations. The lack of a productive running game amplifies the problem here by creating even more of those third-and-longs.
The hope with Dowdle is that the burst, the tackle-breaking ability he has, and his athleticism can help the ground game. With only CeeDee Lamb qualifying as an objectively great receiver while we figure out what Jalen Tolbert can be, defensive coordinators can tee off on third-and-long. They don’t need to worry about anyone else beating them; they can play boutique coverages and roll safeties toward Lamb.
Get out of third-and-8 and into third-and-3, and the playbook opens up. A completion on a short flat route is a first down instead of an ask for a missed tackle. If completed, mesh concepts generally result in first downs. Defenses have to play you tighter and honor the space, so they have to bite faster. One example I always come back to is Lamar Jackson’s first MVP year in 2019. He wasn’t a fully formed quarterback, but the running game that team had was so effective that he rarely faced a third-and-long situation. The Ravens had 55 third-and-long dropbacks with Jackson all season. Prescott has had 35 in five weeks.
Nobody is expecting Dowdle to develop into an All-Pro. That’s an unrealistic ask for a 26-year-old undrafted free agent with 150 career carries and nary a 100-yard game to his name. Think of him as an average NFL running back, which is not an attack: many NFL runners never reach that status, and it’s a credit to the organization that they were patient enough with Dowdle to cultivate him into that five years after entering the league.
If Dowdle can get the Cowboys closer to a 50 percent success rate and get them out of two or three third-and-longs a game, that can give the offense a significant boost. And what we saw in Pittsburgh was a back who is good enough to do that, with enough burst and power to bend around a fairly tough front. If that sounds underwhelming, know that the line between success and failure in the NFL can be as thin as a guy getting a half-block on a play.
So forget about a dominant run offense. That’s not happening with this personnel. But if the Cowboys can just bring this running game up to code, Prescott and the offense will have a lot more breathing room than they enjoyed in September.
Author
