A worrying trend or just noise?

• Notable home-away splits: The Cowboys struggled significantly at home, posting a -66 points differential, while maintaining a +24 advantage on the road, resulting in a 90-point performance differential.

• Defense is a problem: Despite a 3-0 road record, the Cowboys’ defense showed weaknesses, allowing opposing offenses to excel, especially in their home games where they gave up about 650 rushing yards.

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

To be one Dallas Cowboys It’s not easy to play as a fan these days, especially for those who also have a season ticket.

Away from home, the Cowboys haven’t exactly demonstrated the qualities of an elite team, but they are still 3-0 in those games with wins against the Cowboys Cleveland Browns, New York Giants And Pittsburgh Steelers — three mediocre teams.

At home, however, things look nothing short of catastrophic.

Of course, periods of 0-3 can happen, but the Cowboys were absolutely dominated in their three home losses, losing 44-19 New Orleans Saints28-25 to Baltimore Ravens and 47-9 against them Detroit Lions.

The Ravens’ score also suggests a much closer contest than it was, as Baltimore led 28-6 with nine minutes left in the fourth quarter, but the Cowboys managed to keep the game down to one score in the end largely thanks to the Onside kick recovery.

Their defense was particularly worrisome as the Saints, Ravens and Lions moved the chains in 89%, 83% and 84% of their series, respectively. For comparison, the best team in the NFL this season when it comes to moving sticks – this Washington commanders – moves the sticks in 80% of their series.

Derek Carr‘S, Lamar Jackson‘s and Jared Goff‘s dropbacks generated 0.79, 0.43 and 0.34 EPA per game, respectively, and were all at least in the 95th percentile of all games over the last 10 years.

That sounds bad, but at least their rushing defense performed better, right?

Unfortunately, this is not the case, and one could argue that their inability to stop the run is their most pressing problem. They have allowed around 650 rushing yards in their three home games: 190 against the Saints, 274 against the Ravens and 190 against the Lions. For comparison: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers allowed 707 rushing yards all their home games in 2021.

While the Cowboys faced stiffer competition on the road, all of their opponents performed worse than their season average on offense, particularly as measured by their ability to move the chains.

The following team tier table – based on expected points Added per game with adjustments for predictive power – takes into account the general strengths of opposing teams. In addition to all 32 teams, we added two Cowboys logos to show where they would rank if the home and away results were split between two different teams.

Unsurprisingly, the Cowboys’ performance at home would make them by far the worst team in the league.

Have there been cases in the past where a team performed significantly better away than at home over a longer period of time?

The Cowboys’ point differential at home is -66, while their road point differential is +24, resulting in a notable 90 point difference in favor of their performance on the road. In fact, we saw similar sections not long ago.

In 2020, from week 2 to 7, the San Francisco 49ers recorded a point difference of +72 during their three away games, while they recorded a point difference of -23 during their three home games. This results in an even larger delta than 90 points.

In the same year the Tampa Bay Buccaneers experienced a six-game stretch with a point differential of +50 in away games and -41 in home games. And in 2019 the Atlanta Falcons had a six-game stretch where they were 89 points better on the road.

In total, since 2010, there have been 53 six-game stretches in which a team played three home and three away games, and their point difference in the three away games was at least 60 points better than in the three home games.

It is important to note that the location of the games is most likely not the causative factor. When analyzing these 53 six-game stretches, the teams involved averaged an average cumulative point differential of +21.9 in their five (or six since the introduction of Game 17) home games outside of this stretch in the same season. In their away games outside of this stretch in the same season, these teams averaged a cumulative point differential of -12.6.

In other words, teams reverted to the usual expectation of being better at home outside of the six games in which they were good on the road and bad at home, with the per-game difference pretty close to the overall home-field advantage in the NFL.

This serves as a caution against reading too much into certain breakdowns, especially when other confounding factors may be at play. If the Cowboys’ situation is more than just noise, it could indicate that their defense is built to be exposed on strong offenses but perform well against weaker offenses. A similar case can be seen with the 2021 and 2022 Eagles under Jonathan Gannon, who effectively fended off almost every subpar offense while above-average offenses efficiently exploited their weaknesses.

There are some similarities between the Cowboys’ defense and the Eagles’ previous defense, such as a relatively low blitz rate and below-average use of man coverage. However, these similarities alone are not enough to draw definitive conclusions.

It’s safe to say that the Cowboys will not always perform well on the road and will perform disastrous at home in the upcoming games. However, it will be interesting to see if the trend continues of good offenses exceeding their high standards against them while bad offenses fall short of their low standards against them.

After a bye week, the Cowboys face each other this Sunday San Francisco 49ers on Sunday Night Football in Week 8.