Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo dropped back to pass 44 times in Sunday’s loss to the Green Bay Packers. He handed off 11 times.
Looking back on the game, Cowboys coach Wade Phillips says he doesn’t want to see such an imbalance between passing and running again.
“We still want to play balanced,” Phillips said, per Tim MacMahon of ESPNDallas.com. “If we can run the ball, we want to be able to control the ball more. It’d help the defense, if nothing else.”
It’d also make life more difficult for the opposing defense, as Packers defensive coordinator Dom Capers made clear in his post-game comments. Asked why the defense was able to shut the Cowboys out until a garbage time touchdown, Capers said the Cowboys’ lack of balance made life easy for his unit.
“We were able to pressure more [Sunday] because the game became one-dimensional,” said Capers. “You can just go out and blitz, but if people are going to run the ball for big yardage on you you’re foolish. We had some run pressures, they worked decently and it opened up more of our pass pressures.”
It’s not clear why the Cowboys allowed the game to become so one-dimensional: Usually teams don’t abandon the run unless they fall way behind, but the Cowboys abandoned the run even though they were tied 0-0 for half of the game and were only down 3-0 at the start of the fourth quarter. Whatever the reasons for the Cowboys’ pass-happy play calling, Phillips says it can’t happen again.