Blogging The Boys
The Cowboys have one game left to play in the regular season, and no decisions have officially been made, but it sure feels like Matt Eberflus will be departing the staff after just one year as defensive coordinator. Not only has Jerry Jones publicly hinted at it, but his recent comments on Eberflus not playing Logan Wilson suggest a growing frustration.
It’s a strange and saddening development for many reasons. Eberflus has always had a strong track record on defense, routinely producing top 10 defenses in Indianapolis. Even as the Bears head coach, Eberflus often leaned on strong defensive performances as his offenses languished in mediocrity. Eberflus had many failures as a head coach, but the defense was very, very low on the list of problems in Chicago.
So what went wrong in Dallas? Specifically, what went so poorly that Eberflus now seems highly likely to be one-and-done in his return to the franchise where he came into his own as a coach? And what needs to happen to turn things around?
It’s impossible to talk about the 2025 season without bringing up the Micah Parsons trade. Cowboys fans are not even slightly interested in giving Eberflus any excuses, but the Parsons factor can’t be ignored or discounted.
When Eberflus took the job, he believed Parsons would be on the roster. As he started to build out his playbook and install the scheme, it was done so with the belief that the best defender in the league would be on that line of scrimmage, serving as the cornerstone of the pass rush team.
There’s no question that Parsons would’ve made this defense better. He wouldn’t have fixed the busted coverage assignments, but Dallas wouldn’t be so feast-or-famine in the pass rush department, which would have helped the secondary to a degree, as well.
Asking Eberflus to adjust his defense just a week before the season kicked off was objectively unfair. Any coordinator would have struggled with such an adjustment, and it should serve as a reminder that the defensive struggles go beyond just one coordinator.
Of course, plenty of other coordinators would have been able to adjust by now, while Eberflus hasn’t. But things got off to a miserable start before Eberflus had even called a regular season game.
Even before the Parsons trade, some were sounding the alarm on how Eberflus would fit in Dallas. Eberflus had a well-established scheme he fine-tuned right here in Dallas under the mentorship of Rod Marinelli. That meant a fairly faithful adaptation of the storied Tampa 2 defense, which prioritizes disruption from the front four while dropping the back seven into zone coverage with two high safeties.
In Chicago, Eberflus introduced some variation into his schemes, mixing in more Cover 3 than he had in Indianapolis. That coincided with the addition of Andre Curtis, formerly from the Seahawks and currently the Cowboys’ pass game coordinator. Eberflus also incorporated more blitzes into his...
