Cowboys news: Matt Eberflus wants to continue Dallas’ trend of takeaways on defense
Matt Eberflus on focus of 2025 Cowboys defense: ‘We will take the ball away’ – Grant Gordon, NFL.com
The Dallas Cowboys new defensive coordinator looks to continue what Dan Quinn emphasized in 2021—taking the ball away.
“Pretty simple: we will take the ball away,” Eberflus said, via the Cowboys’ website. “That’s what we will do. We will stop the run, and we want to make exciting plays for our football team.”
It’s an unsurprising answer from Eberflus, who was Dallas’ linebackers coach from 2011-2017 prior to a four-year stay as the Indianapolis Colts’ defensive coordinator and the Bears’ head coach for two-plus seasons.
Trademarks of Eberflus’ defenses have been stopping the run, causing turnovers and bending, but not breaking. Generating turnovers has been his most consistent calling card. From 2018 through last season, Eberflus’ Colts and Bears squads ranked in the top 10 in takeaways in all but one season – 2022 with Chicago when it was 14th.
Last season, the Bears, who finished the campaign sans Eberflus after his firing, were 10th in takeaways (24 total). They weren’t too far ahead of the Cowboys (12th with 22).
After what amounted to a disastrous 4-8 start rife with agonizing losses, chaotic finishes and unfulfilled potential, Eberflus was let go by the Bears.
Landing on his feet with the Cowboys wasn’t a major shock considering his past experience with the club. Thus, he returns to a familiar spot in Dallas and a familiar role in being a DC.
“I was here seven years before, so I know the [Jones] family well,” Eberflus said. “I know the community, I know the fanbase, and it’s exciting to be back. That’s what excites me the most: the fan base, the players that we get to work with and in working with the Jones family and Brian Schottenheimer.”
Klayton Adams opens up on working with Schottenheimer, offensive identity, more – Tommy Yarrish, DallasCowboys.com
Klayton Adams wants his players to play with violence.
“For myself being a background of an offensive line coach, the opportunity to be a coordinator, to sit in that chair was important to me and had been a goal, something that I wanted to do at some point,” Adams said. “Being able to do it with the Dallas Cowboys is a huge, even bigger opportunity.”
Adams’ role on staff is not to handle play calling duties, and instead assist Schottenheimer in constructing his gameplan each week. They haven’t worked together before in the past, so the time they spent together now is all about figuring each other out and getting on the same page.
“Trying to mesh what the vision of what he wants is because he’s going to call the plays, and so I think it would be dumb on my part to try to force a lot of things on that call sheet that he doesn’t want to call or he doesn’t feel comfortable calling.” Adams said.
“We’re really excited. I’m very excited to work with him and just to continue to learn each other a little bit… we’re going to get out into some practices and talk through some things and I’m going to see some things differently, he’s going to see some things differently, and it’s going to be a growing process.”
A large part of that process comes down to the players. With Rico Dowdle becoming a free agent this offseason and uncertainty about what the offensive line looks like next year, there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to figuring out the pieces Adams and Schottenheimer will have to work with. That said, there are already some quality pieces in place in the Cowboys’ offense.
“I don’t know that we’ve completely gotten that far yet,” Adams said. “We’re working hard to evaluate what we have here, I think that there’s a lot of nice pieces to work with and we’ll continue to go down that road as we work through player acquisition.”
Jeffrey Lurie sets the example that Jerry Jones should be following – RJ Ochoa, Blogging the Boys
If Jerry Jones follows the blueprint of the Philadelphia Eagles, it could lead to immediate success. That’s gross but a valid point.
Consider that Lurie bought the Eagles just five years after Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys. Comparing which owner is more successful seems like a waste of time, but consider that the latter now only has one more title than the former.
Albert Breer had a great piece about Lurie and his ownership of the Eagles relative to the success that they have had over the last decade. One part stood out where Lurie discussed finding financial liberty to keep the team competitive on an annual basis.
“My philosophy is …” Lurie said, pausing for a second to consider the question. “You’re obviously trying to run a sound business, but I think success is determined by your success on the field and your success in the community. And so anything you can do to maximize those two, the value of the team is going to be appreciated more by your performance and your reputation in the community than anything else. It’s not going to be the EBITDA in a certain year, or two or three or four.
“There’s a reason we just sold limited partnerships for the highest price in sports history. It wasn’t based on being the most profitable team at all. It’s based on the performance over time and the reputation in the community and the forecasting of where we hope to be able to sustain over the next multiple years. It’s much more than the financial bottom line. Now I guess you could get criticized by some Wall Street analysts, but we don’t operate that way. We just don’t operate that way.”
Indeed, Lurie sold 8% of the Eagles in December to two family investment groups, with the valuation of the franchise coming back at $8.3 billion. That meant Lurie got $664 million, or roughly three-and-a-half times what he paid for the entire team in 1994, for a small percentage that, as he sees it, will allow him to continue investing back into the team.
That last paragraph is the most important and perhaps the most telling with regards to the future of NFL franchises. The league is so popular and lucrative nowadays that while the worth of them continues to skyrocket, the idea that any one person or level of financial backing could support it all has grown to seem impossible. It is easy to understand how Lurie sold a minority share of the Eagles to generate some liquid cash that could be used to be aggressive relative to the current day team. That makes sense.
C.J. Gardner-Johnson Was Not Happy With Emmanuel Acho Over Eagles-Cowboys Comparison – Brigid Kennedy, Sports Illustrated
Even in the offseason, the Cowboys-Eagles rivalry is still alive and well.
Still, Dallas players and ownership seem to believe that, like the Birds, a Lombardi trophy is in their immediate grasp. Just before the Super Bowl, for example, owner Jerry Jones said it was “shocking” his team wasn’t playing this year. And, not long after, quarterback Dak Prescott said he thinks the Cowboys are “very close” to the Birds from a performance perspective.
The call is coming from outside the house, too; on Friday, sportscaster and former Eagle Emmanuel Acho claimed on The Facility that the Cowboys are just “one Eagles offseason away from a Super Bowl.”
Well, it looks like Acho’s comments were the straw that broke the camel’s back because at least two Eagles players have since pushed back against the analyst’s remarks, which they seem to feel are unfair and, quite frankly, too soon.
“Bruh you got to be Top 2 hates and not two!!!” Eagles linebacker Nolan Smith responded Sunday. “It doesn’t cost nothing to show love and say ‘THEM BOYS DID THEIR THING’!!!!!”
And on Tuesday, safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson chimed in, too.
“STOP COMPARING US PLEASE!!!” he wrote.
