Taking a closer look at how the Cowboys were able to cause Washington issues in pass protection
markbullock.substack.com
On fourth and three, Washington works out of an empty set and the Cowboys rush five again. Like we’ve seen above, Washington uses the same 5-0 call we’ve seen before to pick up the five rushers. From this perspective, it would appear as though Scherff just gets beat by Parsons for the sack, However, if we look at the wider replay angle, we can see that Washington had a mesh concept called. Dallas ran a ton of man coverage throughout the game and mesh concepts beat man coverage with two shallow crossers working against each other to create traffic for trailing defenders.
The scheme works perfectly, with Curtis Samuel running away from his defender and Ricky Seals-Jones in position to block off any trailing defender. However, the pair nearly run into each other, causing them to stop and avoid each other before getting back on track. That small moment forced Heinicke to hold onto the ball just a bit longer than the protection was designed to. He starts to drift to his left, instead of trying to step up in the pocket, which allows Parsons to break through and get the sack.