I thought this was interesting from Sturms blog
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To continue on yesterday’s theme, it should be stated how uncommon it really is for a team or an offense to change its identity with merely an offseason where the only personnel change was the drafting of a right guard. Zack Martin’s upgrade over Bernadeau is clear, but we won’t suggest that Martin was the tipping point at all.
We continue to feel, as we wrote back in August, that the identity actually changed during last season’s bye week (after the debacle in New Orleans). In that piece we previously linked, you can see all of the many theories, including the most obvious one – that they simply have to do a better job protecting their defense with common sense play-calling from the offense – but they changed their ways before Week 11 against the Giants. Since then, the Cowboys have played 12 games which is 75% of a full season and the confirmation that the Cowboys transitioned from the worst rushing team in the NFL to the best – almost overnight – is flat out stunning.
Over those 12 games, they have run for 1,696 yards (1st in the NFL) at 5.03 yards per carry (1st) and 141.3 yards per game (2nd) for 91 1st Downs (1st) and 49 10-yard runs (3rd).
What makes those numbers absurd is the fact that the 26 games previous to that from Week 1 of 2012 through Week 10 2013, Dallas ran for 2,035 yards (31st), at 3.67 yards per carry (29th), 78.3 yards per game (31st), for 115 1st Downs (29th), and 45 10-yard runs (31st). That is right, if it wasn’t for Jacksonville being worse, the Cowboys flipped a switch and went from worst to nearly first in pretty much every category.
And keep in mind that the personnel is largely the same (but we must account for the time invested for maturity and continuity), when we ponder philosophical changes having the most likely affect on the proceedings. If you think about it from the standpoint of last year’s bye week, Scott Linehan is no longer the Albert Einstein of this operation, but rather the specialist who helped further implement the existing idea. If the final 6 weeks of last season are not that dissimilar in the ground game to the first 6 games of this season, then we are wondering if it was more a conscious (and obvious) decision rather than an accident.
Decoding Linehan – Week 6 – Seattle | Dallas Morning News