The Dallas Cowboys secondary is in good hands in 2024.

This offseason for the Dallas Cowboys has been defined much more by their departures in free agency compared to additions that move the needle for Mike McCarthy’s team to be taken seriously as championship contenders. The NFL draft next month stands as the next real opportunity for the Cowboys to add talent after unsurprisingly passing on the early waves of free agency. They will have their work cut out for them with needs for a new starting left tackle and center being their most pressing roster holes. It is hard to look past all the Cowboys have lost this offseason, also including last year’s starting running back Tony Pollard, and remain optimistic about the strengths that remain on the roster – particularly on defense where new coordinator Mike Zimmer is tasked with picking up the pieces left by Dan Quinn to keep this unit near the top of the league.

In a contract year for McCarthy, a coach that has spent much of his time in Dallas pounding the table for better play in the trenches on both sides of the ball after playoff exits to Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers and now Matt LaFleur and the Packers thanks to porous run defense, the Cowboys have drifted pretty far from this goal by not only losing two starters on the offensive line but a good amount of depth on the defensive line too.

Dorance Armstrong and Dante Fowler both followed Quinn within the NFC East to the Washington Commanders, Neville Gallimore signed with the Miami Dolphins, and most recently veteran defensive tackle Jonathan Hankins got away to the Seattle Seahawks. The 2024 Cowboys being any better than the team that took the field last year and won 12 games, also with limited contributions from their free agency and draft classes, is a hard sell right now with defensive line depth being added to their laundry list of needs.

Building leads early in games via the passing game, using this lead to unleash their pass rush and create takeaways on the back end, and finishing games by scoring on short fields with either touchdowns or seemingly-automatic Brandon Aubrey field goals was a successful Cowboys blueprint last year. For much of the coaching staff and players on expiring deals alike, their isn’t much time to completely rewrite this blueprint, but the basis to do so on defense has already been put in place.

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The Cowboys are already familiar with longtime NFL coach Mike Zimmer as their new defensive coordinator. Zimmer’s first job in the league was with the Cowboys in 1994. The following year, Zimmer took over as defensive backs coach and was part of the Super Bowl XXX team in 1996, and then was promoted to defensive coordinator in 2000. This would be the start of a 13 year run for Zimmer as a DC in the NFL, the first six of which came with Dallas, followed by Atlanta and Cincinnati. In 2014 he got his first opportunity to be a head coach, leading the Minnesota Vikings from 2014-2021. The Vikings defenses under Zimmer were always known to be incredibly fundamentally sound and tough to play against because of how well they understood their assignments. Linebacker Eric Kendricks was a key part of them from 2015-22, and reuniting with Zimmer after spending last season with the Chargers still stands as the Cowboys only significant external free agency move this offseason.

With Zimmer’s specific area of expertise defensively being on the backend, the Cowboys were fortunate earlier this offseason to retain defensive backs coach Al Harris for a fifth season. Harris was a key part of Quinn’s staff in helping prepare the Cowboys cornerbacks each week, a group mainly responsible for Dallas leading the NFL in takeaways in 2021 and 2022. Harris is now the Cowboys assistant head coach, empowering him even further in an area where the Cowboys are seemingly depending on a lot more going into this season. Pairing DaRon Bland and Trevon Diggs together again after Diggs tore his ACL this season is the headline for the Cowboys secondary on paper right now, but the team also brought back veteran Jourdan Lewis and have Stephon Gilmore still available in free agency if they can negotiate a return.

Eric Scott Jr. is a second year cornerback still on the roster that immediately got labeled as a “Quinn guy” after the Cowboys traded up in the sixth round to take the lengthy defender out of Southern Mississippi, but his length and ability to stay in phase in man coverage make him a Zimmer scheme fit as well. Nahshon Wright and Josh Butler provide further depth at cornerback, while Donovan Wilson, Malik Hooker, Israel Mukuamu, and Juanyeh Thomas give Zimmer a deep and versatile group of safeties to work with. Of all the positions other than quarterback to link Dallas to in this year’s draft, the secondary feels like the only one relatively set enough to not expect anything more than depth picks being in play.

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Of course, it doesn’t hurt in the slightest that this secondary will be complemented by one of the best pass rushers and individual match up players in the NFL in Micah Parsons. When joined by the always-clutch DeMarcus Lawrence, Parsons is a player that can make up for a lot of deficiencies elsewhere on a defense with his versatility, and the Cowboys will certainly be asking a lot from him in their new scheme this season.

The question is, can Dallas pull off this rebuild retooling on the fly and game plan around the strength of their entire roster potentially being the secondary? When things were going well for this team under Quinn, the trio of McCarthy, Quinn, and special teams coordinator John Fassel more than earned their flowers as a dynamic bunch that had this team at a high level of preparation in all three phases. It didn’t take long for this to unravel when Dallas was taken out of their game scripts though, and while going from one former NFL head coach to another at defensive coordinator is good for McCarthy’s ability to focus on the offense as play-caller, a contrast in styles that didn’t complement each other as much as needed in the biggest games was evident at the end of the McCarthy/Quinn era.

If McCarthy truly wants to rest his defense by running the ball effectively, the Cowboys at least had a back they expected would help them do so in Pollard last season, but now approach this year’s draft with only Rico Dowdle, Malik Davis, and Deuce Vaughn in the backfield. The 2023 team was forced to funnel the ball through CeeDee Lamb as a clear WR1 and eventually establish Brandin Cooks in his first season with the team as their second option, airing the ball out to complement an attacking defense that struggled mightily to line up in close games, defend the run, and get off the field without turnover luck. The Cowboys offense looked terribly out of sync when trying to control the clock themselves and play methodically, a style they fell back on particularly in road games where Dallas was 4-5 with losses to playoff teams Miami, Buffalo, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

The style of offense that best complements Zimmer’s more traditional man coverage approach to defense may be very similar to how the Cowboys played last season, which is good for a team seemingly even more dependent on Dak Prescott and Lamb on paper right now. The Cowboys were prone to give up the big play through the air at times in their pursuit of takeaways, or on the ground with poor run fits and size in the front seven, and under Zimmer they should be able to do a better job of forcing offenses to take the long way down the field.

While it is a pipe dream that McCarthy will be able to pair this with an offense that dominates time of possession themselves with a punishing ground game, they can look to improve in the short passing game to accomplish the same goal. Jalen Tolbert and Jalen Brooks have already climbed a rung on the depth chart this offseason with the release of Michael Gallup, and both are capable of making plays with the ball in their hands when given the opportunity. Getting the ball out of Prescott’s hands quickly to create ‘run after the catch’ opportunities for Lamb, Tolbert, Brooks, and Cooks can also help the Cowboys protect any new starters they have on the offensive line, and will have to be a major area of improvement in year two of the McCarthy and Brian Schottenheimer offense if this team hopes to stay atop the NFC East.

On the latest episode of the Hidden Yardage podcast, Jess Haynie and I discussed both the real meaning of the Cowboys “all in” approach to repeating as division champions, as well as how much they are really relying on Zimmer in his first season. You can listen below and subscribe on Spotify and Apple for new episodes every Tuesday afternoon.

If the biggest takeaway from watching the teams that advanced in the playoffs well beyond the Cowboys (making NFL history on their way out as the first team to lose to a #7 seed) was their improved ability to set the tone up front on both offense and defense, the second was the way other offenses stretched defenses horizontally and not just vertically like the Cowboys did for much of 2023. Whether with pre-snap motion or play-action, getting the ball in space to play-makers like Christian McCaffrey or Amon-Ra St. Brown seemingly came easy for the 49ers under Shanahan or Lions with trendy HC candidate Ben Johnson as play-caller. The Cowboys finding a way to do the same while also adding to the playbook for emerging star TE Jake Ferguson would go a long way in balancing out the type of strong defense they’re expecting to uphold in the transition-on-the-fly from Quinn to Zimmer.

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With this very glass half full look at a best case scenario for the Cowboys also comes the harsh reality that much of their work this offseason has seemingly been about looking beyond the 2024 season and setting up for more major changes in 2025 and beyond. If this proves the case, there are certain areas of a team and staff that any new coach would love to see in place, with the highly-respected Mike Zimmer as DC being one of them. Another is a strong offensive line, the foundation of which Dallas almost has to put in place starting with the draft after letting both Tyron Smith and Tyler Biadasz get away.

Zimmer’s defenses have historically improved greatly in their second season, but the timing of what the 2025 Cowboys could look like outside of a defense that currently has a strong secondary and deeper concerns everywhere else makes the Cowboys tried and true offseason plan of sitting out free agency and leaning on their current homegrown talent even more questionable.

Their current head coach in McCarthy went from once downplaying any power struggle when it came to having a former HC in Quinn as a coordinator, to welcoming another in Zimmer but hoping he can do anything possible to work with Zimmer beyond 2024 in a contract year. Whether or not the 67-year-old Zimmer, who will turn 68 before the season, has any interest in being a NFL head coach again and if the Cowboys would give him this opportunity after the years of speculation that Quinn was next in line after McCarthy remains to be seen. For now the pair must find a way to maximize this team’s current potential, starting in the secondary where the Cowboys have the right mix of established talent, up and coming depth, and the right scheme fits that’s hardly found at position groups anywhere else on the current roster.