Dallas Cowboys vs San Francisco 49ers: An “Official” Breakdown

Final Thoughts

Can the Dallas Cowboys win this game? Absolutely, in fact, they should definitely be favored. These two teams are fairly balanced in skill level and can pretty easily exploit the opposing team’s weaknesses by playing their brand of football.

What works against the 49ers, more so than the Cowboys, is that they are a bit more one-dimensional once their rushing attack doesn’t work as expected.

San Francisco is incredibly committed to the run. Even when they were down against the Rams on Sunday, they remained committed to running the ball and it eventually worked as they got back into the game and generated momentum.

If Dallas can get some breaks in their favor while defending the run, they have the talent to play man coverage and match zone coverage against this talented group of skill position players.

Also within the concept of running, if the Dallas Cowboys can reduce the number of yards San Francisco gains on outside zone runs specifically, they stand a larger chance at keeping San Francisco’s offense behind the chains increasingly likely they cash in on a turnover.

On offense, the Dallas Cowboys have the ability to throw most passing concepts against this passing defense, attacking wherever they want, assuming protection holds up. (For some reason, this is a harder task than what fans are used to expecting of this offensive line.)

Of course, the problem with me saying all of this is that we’re expecting the Cowboys to execute at their best. This team, at many points during the regular season, keeps shooting themselves in the foot with mistakes through penalties or missed tackles and it keeps giving opposing teams new lives at possibly the worst points of the game.

But, if Dallas can get past this game, they stand a favorable chance against Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, or Arizona as Tampa Bay and Los Angeles have similar running tendencies and share some similarities in play-calling across the board. In regards to the Cardinals, we’ve played them before so that should be worth something?

Dallas is about as healthy as it could be at this point of the season, so hopefully, their game planning and execution for this week work, because then the team, fans, and analysts will be starting an offseason full of questions.