NFL Week 6 Preview: Cowboys-Packers, Bears-Falcons and More

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Warren Sharp (1:01)

Welcome to Sharp Football Analysis. I'm Warren Sharp, and this is the Matchup Show. Games are decided when coaches, teams, and players take advantage of their matchups, so we decided to model an entire show around it. I've teamed up with my main man, Rich Hribar, and we're gonna be walking through the critical matchups in week six that are gonna help decide the outcome of these games. You don't wanna miss it, stay tuned.

All right, Rich, let's jump right in here. These games are kind of nasty for the most part, but there are some really interesting matchups in my opinion that are going to really dictate the outcome of these games. And there's a few games that we wanna start with that are a little bit higher profile that I think are gonna be a little bit more intriguing to many of the viewers out there. And the first one we're gonna hit is Jordan Love and the Green Bay Packers going up against the Dallas Cowboys. And I wanna start with this specific matchup. Jordan Love and Matt LaFleur going up against this Dallas Cowboys defense. Because you have some really interesting insights on this one here. I'm gonna start first by discussing the fact that the Packers defense, the Packers own offense rather, has dealt with a number of injuries as we know. Offensive line has been beat up a little bit. They don't really have a run game to speak of. And so they've really had to focus a little bit more on the drop back passing game. I want to pull up this first graphic here.

We can see that the Green Bay Packers are down at the bottom right. And this is strength of schedule of opposing defenses, specifically opposing overall defenses. And you can see they've played the number two toughest schedule, the number 31 easiest schedule. That's why they're down at the bottom right here of opposing defenses so far this year.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is finally approaching. And that's where this next graphic comes in. We look at it on a week by week basis. We can see that this Dallas Cowboys defense ranks 30th in the NFL and finally is a bottom tier defense that the Green Bay Packers can go up against. We already saw a lot of success that they had last week against the Chicago Bears. But now they get an even worse defense in the Dallas Cowboys. Last week, they gained 2.7 yards per rush.

That didn't help them win the game. What they did is Jordan Love throwing for 358 passing yards, 11.8 yards per attempt in their 31-7 victory. Matt LaFleur opened with a pass first attack, 68% pass rate on first half early downs, which is one of the higher rates in his tenure. Sometimes he does have games like that. They really leaned into the passing attack.

And it doesn't really make sense to have that high of a pass rate as I'm sure you know, Rich, if you can't protect your quarterback. But they were able to figure that out. The issue was the first three weeks of the season, they hadn't figured that out. The first three weeks, Jordan Love was hit a whopping 31 times. The most of any quarterback in the NFL, he was pressured on 44% of his drop backs, the number two most of any quarterback in the NFL. As a result of all that pressure, they use play action at just a 17% rate, which was the fourth lowest in the NFL. But everything changed the last couple of weeks. Love went from 31 hits the first three weeks to only seven the last two weeks. He went from a 44% pressure rate the first three weeks to 19% the last two weeks. That was the number two highest pressure rate in the NFL over the first three weeks, to the number one lowest pressure rate over the last two weeks. You dug into a lot of the numbers here to describe what they actually changed. This isn't just randomly happening to help protect Jordan Love a little bit more and then allow them to get off these deeper passes off of play action and increase their play action rate. So talk to us about what you think Matt LaFleur did to change the offense and then whether or not you think it will work against the Dallas Cowboys.