Let’s get this straight right up front: and the offensive ineptitude that is dooming their season. There are no suggestions about what they need to do Youth Terrance Williams Jersey , or how to do it. No, it is all about the questions. It also is not about the players. This is all about the coaching staff and ownership. We have long known that Dallas is the most unique organization in the league, with the owner and his son serving as the general manager and his chief assistant. But why are things going so badly, with no apparent attempt to correct anything?Maybe there is a little PTSD from the trampling by the Titans for me, but over the past few days, these things have just been swirling ‘round and ‘round my head, like the way the 2018 Cowboys season is orbiting that drain. And the more I try to sort things out, the more I keep running into the same idea.It looks like Scott Linehan is not even trying to fix things.Now, there is one key assumption underlying this. It is that Linehan is indeed doing the main work in coming up with a game plan and is calling plays without any significant interference. There is certainly no reason to think otherwise, but it does make it hard to understand just why Linehan continues steering this ship right into that iceberg, and even yells at people to quit re-arranging the deck chairs because he likes them just the way they are.We have collectively been screaming about the predictability of the Dallas offense all season. Over at The Athletic, Bob Sturm did one of the best jobs I have seen in illustrating just how true that is. He includes videos of three virtually identical third down plays. Here’s one (it may not be supported on all devices, so what it shows is all the receivers going to the sticks, and then curling back to the quarterback, a play so many of us have become sick of).Your browser does not support HTML5 video.Here’s what Sturm has to say about it.It is not the only thing that is predictable, but given the low rate of converting third-and-long for the Cowboys, it is perhaps the most egregious.And that comes back around to the underlying question here: Why? Surely that is not the only play for third-and-long they have? And if it is, why are they not coming up with something else? Geez, if everyone is expecting you to do this, wouldn’t it seem like a good idea to have someone do a double move and go deep? Even if Dak Prescott didn’t hit him, it would force the defense to loosen things up. Shame the Cowboys don’t have a wide receiver who can do . . . oh, wait http://www.cowboysauthorizedshops.com/authentic-jeff-heath-jersey , now they do in Amari Cooper. Of course, they could also have someone do a crossing pattern and put some moves on to get open in another way. Shame they don’t have a slot . . . oh, yeah, Cole Beasley.There is an old clich that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result to happen is a definition of insanity. Well, this is about as perfect an example of just that as you will ever see.As stipulated above, the assumption here is that this is all Linehan’s doing. Now, if Garrett or even Jerry Jones has told him that this is the only play he can run on third and long, then the problem is different (and maybe even worse). But for this discussion, we’ll stick it to Linehan. And wish we could get him in an interrogation room, slip him a little sodium pentothol, and ask him one simple thing. WHY?It just makes no sense. Is it stubbornness? A determination to prove that his way will work? That is highly illogical, because it not only fails, but now is little more than a guide to defenses on when and how to shut the Cowboys down. When everyone in the secondary, the defense as a whole, the opponents’ sideline, the patrons in the stands, the announcers, the entire TV audience, and random people stopped on the street can tell you exactly what each receiver is going to do, where they are going to do it, and when, almost any defense out there can stop it. There’s actually only one way to give that particular play any chance at all Tyrone Crawford Jersey , and that is to send out a receiver or receivers who excel at winning jump balls against defenders. Maybe that was the plan . . . oh, wait, they released the one guy they had who was really, really good at that during the offseason. (By the way, hearing about Dez Bryant’s injury was so very sad. All the best to him.)It almost looks like a case of deliberate sabotage. Which is even more insane. That’s why there are no solutions to offer here. This is total nonsense, in every meaning of the word. That play, thanks to the work by Sturm (and he is far from the only one to bring this up, he just did it so well) is just one of the easiest ones to see. We also see a lot of other tendencies from the Cowboys that appear to have been figured out by just about every other team they play (I have no idea why the Jacksonville Jaguars were such an obvious exception). The situation cries out for Linehan to change things up, try something different. Heck, the first team he did that to might be so stunned that they can’t recover.That’s the problem, though. If he hasn’t found reason to change at this point, with the media and fans cleaning out bins of pitchforks and torches in most of Texas and several surrounding areas, will he do so now? Maybe the visible anger from Jerry Jones after that crap against the Titans will motivate him, but given the intransigence so far, you have to wonder. This has already become absurd. If Linehan does manage to extract his cranium from the nether reaches of his alimentary canal and do something about this, does it really matter? The upcoming five games look really tough. And the first eight weeks of the season have already provided sufficient evidence that he needs to go. Maybe he knows that, and sees no reason to fix things for a team that he will be leaving. Tin-foil hat stuff? Yeah, it is. But what is the real explanation here? Nothing makes sense. Maybe Jerry Jones is secretly doing the game plans and selecting plays himself. Or Jason Garrett is the one really calling these inexplicable shots. But that is not really any more sensible.I got no answers. Maybe someone will get an inside scoop on this one day. But I rather doubt it. It is the great mystery of the 2018 Cowboys season.Cowboys Poll: How many games must Jason Garrett win to keep his job? Things have not been going the Cowboys’ way this year, and that’s not just a knee-jerk reaction to the last games.No, things have been out of kilter for one reason or another since Week 1. In fact, things have been out of kilter since the Atlanta game in Week 10 last year. How much out of kilter? Just look at these stats over the last 13 games:Points scored: 211 (NFL rank: 31st)Pass attempts: 376 (30th)Passing Yards per Attempt: 5.91 (29th)Offensive Passer Rating: 73.9 (27th)And if things remain the same as they’ve been for those 13 games, the team will be lucky to finish this year with an 8-8 record. The Pythagorean Formula (for more details Authentic Jaylon Smith Jersey , go here) was developed to measure overall team strength on the hypothesis that a team’s true strength could be measured more accurately by looking at points scored and points allowed, rather than by looking at wins and losses. The interesting thing about the formula, at least for our purposes today, is you can calculate a projected season win total after every single game. Which is exactly what I did with the cumulative points differentials after each game: Obviously, the results here get more robust with every additional data point. After some wild swings in the first two game, the win projection has settled in at around six to seven wins since. And this far into the season, the data is robust enough to suggest that the Cowboys are not suddenly going to go on a six-game win streak.Another method to calculate projected wins is via passer rating differential (PRD). We know that PRD is one of the stats most closely linked to winning in the NFL. And PRD can be plugged into a very simple formula to predict win totals in the NFL. The PRD formula (Projected Wins = PRD*0.16+8) has shown a fairly close correlation with the Cowboys’ actual wins over the last decade or so, but has been oddly off the last few years: Overall, the PRD formula generates a mean average error of 1.9 games over the last four seasons, which isn’t great, and is off significantly more in the last two years. This suggests that unlike previous years, the performance in the passing game for the Cowboys is not as big a determinant in their W/L loss as in the previous year.Coincidentally, with the arrival of Ezekiel Elliott in Dallas and the departure of Tony Romo in 2016, the Cowboys became a much more run-oriented team, so I figured that I had to find a way to account for the running game in the PRD formula. So I played around withe the data a bit came up with a modified PRD Formula that includes a team’s rushing yards differential (RYD) as follows: Projected Wins = (PRD + RYD/50) * 0.16 + 8.In statistics, the relationship between two variables is called a correlation, and the strength of that correlation is measured by the “correlation coefficient”. This coefficient (r虏) is expressed as a number between 1 and -1. The closer the r虏 number is to 1 or -1, the stronger the relationship between the two variables. The closer it is to zero, the weaker the relationship. I ran the original PRD formula against the 2017 regular season results for all 32 teams, and r虏 between Passer Rating Differential (PRD) and wins in 2017 was 0.62. Not bad, but not great either. Rushing yards differential for 2017 was a decidedly unimpressive 0.17, which is one reason why so many stat heads poo-poo the running game and suggest teams need to pass more. But after a little tinkering Youth Ezekiel Elliott Jersey , something interesting happened. The modified PRD, which now includes rushing yards differential, came back with an r虏 of 0.77 which is one of the strongest correlations you’ll find outside of points differential. Here’s a graph that illustrates the correlation between the modified PRD formula and wins for all 32 NFL teams in 2017:In terms of Mean Average Error, the original PRD Formula was off by 1.6 games on average in 2017, the modified PRD reduced that 1.3 games. And once applied to the last few Cowboys season, the modified PRD also delivered much better results: With the modified PRD, the mean average error for the Cowboys improved from 1.9 to a very impressive 0.9 wins. So what does the modified PRD project as the final record for the 2-3 Cowboys? With a PRD after five games of -22.5 and a RYD of +200, the formula projects 5.5 wins for the Cowboys this year.So the Pythagorean Formula has the 2018 Cowboys at 6.6 wins, the modified PRD sees them at 5.5 wins (both projections already factor in the Cowboys’ two wins). The modified PRD tells basically the same story as the Pythagorean formula, even if the projected win totals are a little lower. Want more projection? Fivethirtyeight.com has the Cowboys at 7.5 wins. Football Outsiders project the Cowboys for 7.4 wins.Looks like the 2018 Cowboys are likely headed to a six- or seven-win season, with eight wins as a clear ceiling. Which brings us to the titular question of this post. How many games must Jason Garrett win to keep his job?Many fans would like to fire Garrett regardless of his record this year, but that’s not the way the Cowboys operate, as Tom Ryle pointed out the end of last season: Jason Garrett is in his ninth season as a head coach with the Cowboys, and has had plenty of time to mold the team to his wishes. Yet all he has to show for it is one playoff win, a 65-59 career record, and another season that that looks to be his fifth non-winning season. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the ineptness of the father-son duo playing GM. Yet those two will be the final arbiters of Garrett’s fate, and as Tom points out, they might wimp out at firing Garret just as Garrett wimped out on the 4th-and-1 in Houston.No such wimping in Vegas, where Garrett is now listed as the mostly likely head coach to be fired first.And Jerry Jones wasn’t too happy about his coach on Sunday either. RJ Ochoa pointed out that Jones publicly contradicting Garrett’s decision to punt doesn’t bode well for the coach. So how many wins will it take for Jerry Jones to hang on to Garrett for yet another season?Give your answer in the attached poll or in the comments section below.