The Dallas Cowboys are still working on rebuilding their defensive coaching staff under new, first-time coordinator Christian Parker. Along with this, the scouting process to identify the players that will actually lead the defensive turnaround this team needs to get back in the playoff conversation is well underway. One vitally important step along this scouting process, especially with the Cowboys holding two first-round picks, was this week’s Senior Bowl practices and Saturday’s game.
The Cowboys
have drafted at least one player that participated in the Senior Bowl for ten years in a row, making the on-field work from Mobile, Alabama the most important thing that happened this week. The second most important thing was likely Stephen Jones addressing the media about the team’s offseason plans, which actually resulted in some valuable takeaways.
Reading between the lines of Cowboys front office quotes to actually gather what they may or may not do is sometimes a losing endeavor, but now with an entirely new defensive scheme to find players for (a scheme that Cowboys fans are already familiar with thanks to watching their own team’s offense struggle against it), there is an easier level of transparency to understanding what the Cowboys are looking for on this side of the ball.
This quote from Stephen Jones is particularly noteworthy, when sticking with keeping all eyes on the defensive rebuild going on yet again in Dallas.
“The bigger thing, which is we started to do some but we didn’t get to do it much in camp so it was kind of on the fly, but a lot of five-man fronts,” Jones said. “When we ran those five-man fronts, [it] creates a lot of one-on-ones for our better players going the three big guys plus [Donovan] Ezeiruaku and whether it’s a [Jadeveon Clowney] or someone like that.
“The things you can do with the exotic pressures … we obviously have a lot of interest in. We felt like we could have done a better job last year of getting more pressure and then obviously we need to cover better.”
The defensive scheme that’s most often being referenced when talking about what the Cowboys are installing for 2026 is the “Fangio scheme”, but of course the team did not actually hire Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. They hired Christian Parker, one of Fangio’s closest assistants with both the Broncos and the Eagles, and with that the Fangio concepts will certainly be prominent. Parker also deserves the opportunity to tailor his own scheme, and base it around the personnel he has to work with on this Cowboys roster. The first major difference between how a purely Fangio defense operated and how Parker’s will work in Dallas may have been revealed by Stephen Jones here, talking about the continued usage of five-man defensive fronts.
The Cowboys have had the polar opposite of continuity on defense for the last two years going from Mike Zimmer to Matt Eberflus, and now Parker. When it comes to these five-man defensive fronts though, they’ve weirdly backed their way into actually having some resemblance of continuity with that. Zimmer’s defense used these fronts in certain situations, although the Cowboys lacked the personnel to be truly effective with them. They were used more often in Eberflus’ defenses, but mostly after the Cowboys acquired Quinnen Williams at the trade deadline while already having Solomon Thomas, Osa Odighizuwa, and Kenny Clark at defensive tackle. As Jones alluded to, if they are going to remain a big part of the Cowboys defense under Parker, this will be their first chance to know that five-man fronts are part of the plan early enough in the offseason process to draft with them in mind, approach free agency with it in mind, and work on them all the way through training camp.
One of the core principles of the Fangio defense is being able to commit numbers to coverage on the backend. Obviously, the math here can be pretty simple. If a team has a dominant four-man front, they can put as many as seven players in coverage. With a five-man front, this maximum for coverage is one less at six, unless you drop one into coverage. The single biggest key to the Eagles winning last year’s Super Bowl was the way their four-man front overwhelmed the Chiefs at the line of scrimmage, forcing Patrick Mahomes to throw under duress into coverage that had a numbers advantage as well.
The Cowboys are talking about not only winning with five-man fronts, but turning up the pressure even more using “exotic pressures” that these five-man fronts allow for. This may be some slight insight into their plans for how the linebacker position will be retooled. Both Kenneth Murray and Jack Sanborn are free agents, the two linebackers that Eberflus brought in that both did not work out. The Cowboys allowing Murray to play the volume of snaps he did despite being ineffective was one of their worst defensive mistakes of the season, and Sanborn missed much of the season with an injury. The Cowboys need a reset on the second level of their defense, and while the traditional structure of a Fangio defense would call for linebackers adept in coverage to fill this void, Dallas does have DeMarvion Overshown and Marist Liufau as in-house options, both still on their rookie contracts, and both with the ability to blitz effectively. If the Cowboys understandably feel they have more pieces to currently work with in the front seven compared to a secondary that also needs a major reset, adjusting their defensive philosophy to prioritize pressures in the front seven over coverage is a logical place to go.
In a part of the offseason where rosters exist in a near-liquid state and speculation about how they will change runs wild from free agency projections to mock drafts, expecting the Cowboys to keep their defensive line depth in tact, and even add to it further so they can major in five-man fronts, is a solid place to base these projections off of. The last little bit of this quote from Stephen that helps here is that he alluded to pending unrestricted free agent Jadeveon Clowney as a guy that benefited from the Cowboys upgrades at defensive tackle, but also said “someone like that” could be in that role. Many Cowboys fans would love to see Clowney back in the silver and blue after his veteran presence and mix of run defense paired with pass rush ability was a welcome sight on a defense with so many holes elsewhere. But if he doesn’t return, the Cowboys targeting a similar type of mold at defensive end to pair with the speed rush ability of Donovan Ezeiruaku on the other side could be in the cards.
From the very top of the Cowboys coaching staff in Brian Schottenheimer, the outward desire to win the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball has been there, and now on both sides of the ball the Cowboys may be looking to achieve this with five down linemen.
