Ezekiel Elliott passed along the credit. The Dallas Cowboys’ tailback, a three-time Pro Bowler enjoying a resurgent season, had just run for 110 yards and notched a pair of touchdowns in a win over the Giants in early October. Afterward, he suggested the stats belonged as much to his offensive line as to him.
“From the beginning of the game, they established the line of scrimmage, they dominated the line of scrimmage,” Elliott said from the podium of his postgame news conference. “They got the run game going, and everything fell into place after that.”
This was standard etiquette among runners and blockers, but it was also an accurate summary of what has helped get the Cowboys off to their best start in recent memory. Dallas’ offensive front — led by left tackle Tyron Smith and right guard Zack Martin, stalwarts with a combined 19 seasons, 13 Pro Bowl honors, and, this year, one sack allowed between them — had spent the afternoon bashing, trapping, rerouting, and otherwise manhandling the Giants’ defense front. It was representative of the type of performance they’ve been putting on throughout the early part of the NFL season.
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After scuffling to .500 or worse records the past two seasons, the Cowboys have reversed course in 2021, emerging from their bye week with a 5-1 record and an offense averaging a league-high 34.2 points per game heading into their “Sunday Night Football” matchup with the Minnesota Vikings. Credit has popularly flowed to quarterback Dak Prescott (an MVP candidate now fully recovered from a gruesome 2020 ankle injury), Elliott (back to his early-career form) and a resurgent defense led by cornerback Trevon Diggs (who has seven interceptions in six games).
The club’s bedrock, though, is the partnership established before the arrival of either skill-position star and reestablished after neck and calf injuries in 2020 robbed Smith and Martin of 14 and six games, respectively. The Cowboys’ emergence as a Super Bowl contender has coincided with the return of its dominant offensive line.
“They’re the most important, if you ask me,” Prescott said this summer. “From the time I got drafted until now, the offense is built off those guys. ... When you have those guys back healthy, energized, it’s special.”
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This season, the Cowboys have run the ball on 47.2 percent of their snaps, up from 40.2 percent in 2020 and 42.9 percent in 2019; only four teams are closer to 50-50. Their offensive line rates as the best in the league at run-blocking, according to Pro Football Focus, and the fourth-best at pass protection; they’re the only unit in the top five in both categories. Not coincidentally, their 164 ground yards per game rank second in the NFL, and Prescott’s completion percentage (74.9) is the third-highest.
No one number can encapsulate the contributions of a five-man collective — offensive linemen are unique in compiling no traditional statistics (carries, catches, tackles) of their own — but experts agree that Dallas’s line has served as something of a skeleton key for the offense, unlocking all of the potent qualities it has to offer.
“You can stay three-dimensional,” Jeff Saturday, a retired six-time Pro Bowl center now working as an analyst for ESPN, said of the luxuries afforded by the Cowboys’ front. “You can run it, you can do play-action, or you can drop back. It makes it very difficult for defenses to respond. They have to play run-first, and then they’re playing the pass from a recovery perspective. It’s a thing of beauty.”
Martin, describing the approach, modifies a sports cliche. “We’re an offense that aggressively takes what the defense gives us,” he told reporters.
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That flexibility comes, in large part, from the line’s two stars. Smith stands 6-foot-5 and, despite carrying 320 pounds, can run a sub-five-second 40-yard dash. His arms are disproportionately long, and big enough around that he wears a knee brace on his left elbow. But it is the technique honed over a decade in the league — the smooth strides of his massive cleats, the timing of his punches to the opponent’s chestplate — that paralyzes the league’s top pass rushers before they can pressure Prescott’s blind side.
“He literally hoists them,” Saturday said. “It’s like he’s hanging a shirt up on a peg.”
Martin, meanwhile, is a mobile masher, the chaperone clearing upfield space for Dallas’s backs.
“Zack’s our best player on our offense,” Elliott said before the Cowboys’ season opener against the Buccaneers (their only loss), which Martin missed after testing positive for the coronavirus. “Most runs, they’re coming back behind him.”
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Smith’s pass-blocking grade ranks first among all NFL tackles, according to PFF, while Martin’s run-blocking grade is best among guards. But if the Cowboys seem like a team just entering its prime — Prescott is 28 years old, Elliott 26, Diggs 24, star receiver CeeDee Lamb 22 — Smith and Martin operate on a different timeline. Offensive linemen’s production tends to fall off once they reach their thirties, and both players will turn 31 this season. They know better than most how quickly the end can come. Travis Frederick, the all-pro center who played alongside Smith and Martin for six seasons, retired after 2019 at the age of 29, having developed an autoimmune disease.
“You don’t get that many chances at this,” Smith said during a recent radio appearance, “so you gotta make it count.”
For now, Dallas enjoys a rare alignment of health and perspective, of rising stars and established leaders. Late in the third quarter of their Week 4 win over the Carolina Panthers — at the time the stingiest defensive team in the league — the Cowboys took over after a turnover and struck with what has become characteristic quickness. Backup running back Tony Pollard swiveled upfield for a 14-yard gain, and two plays later Prescott hit receiver Cedrick Wilson on a timing route for a 23-yard score.
There’s another, and maybe more telling, way to describe the sequence. Martin cleared out a linebacker, and Smith picked up a blitz.
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