Dallas City News

When the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns meet this afternoon, it will be a game featuring two of the best defenses that the NFL saw last season. You can pick whatever basic or advanced metric that you like and you will find that Dallas and Cleveland populate the top of just about every defensive list from 2023. Teams change year to year obviously, but the primary pieces of each unit are back for more which is why this game should be interesting to watch for those who love low-scoring affairs.

Consider that our friends at FanDuel have an over/under for the game set at 40.5 which is tied for the lowest of all Week 1 contests. Nothing is predictable and anything can happen, but we shouldn’t expect to see a ton of fireworks.

What can we expect, though? This season the NFL media machine unveiled a new tool within their NFL+ Premium tier called NFL Pro. It has an enormous amount of data about each game, including the standard things like condensed games and All-22 footage, but one of the interesting things is the projections and advantages it has laid out for every matchup.

Here is how they see the top Dallas Cowboys offensive players faring this week (we have also included projections for the top Browns offensive players):

First of all, there is obviously a mathematical formula behind the projections which is why there are decimals. You know how those things go. Also, there are no listed projections for CeeDee Lamb, perhaps because these were potentially put together while he was holding out. Surely that will change for the future.

But these are all rather pedestrian numbers for the top playmakers on the Cowboys offense which is obviously a credit to Cleveland’s defense and how we expect them to perform. While there are no listed projections for Lamb, it is worth mentioning he will be going up against a stout Browns secondary that will make matters tough. Denzel Ward, Greg Newsome and Martin Emerson each finished last season within the top five corners in coverage success rate when targeted, among cornerbacks with at least 40 targets. Lamb did lead the NFL last season though in both receptions and receiving yards against man coverage specifically. Maybe the matchups are the fireworks we should be looking for.

NFL Pro lays out advantages as mentioned, and when you look at every major category the defense is projected to win out for both Dallas and Cleveland.

Again, this all suggests that each defense will mostly succeed against the offense that they are facing which will put a ton of pressure on finding a point in time to crack through. Dallas had one of the best offenses in the NFL last season, and despite having two rookies along the offensive line, may be able to power through on the ground.

The first slide are passing matchups and the second are rushing.

It needs to be underscored again that we are talking about two of the very best defenses in the NFL so there is nothing that is going to be easily had for anyone on offense this week. But if you really had to pick or bet on one to find a way to win more often or consistently the data suggests that it is in fact Dallas.