Cowboys Looking to Clean Up Tackling Ahead of Giants Game

The Dallas Cowboys have been practicing this week with a renewed emphasis on good tackling, a development that is not at all surprising if you saw the team’s last game, a 30-6 loss to the Patriots at AT&T Stadium.

“On defense, one of the things we have to improve upon is the tackling,” Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett said. “There’s been a number of times when we didn’t get the guy to the ground. We’re in position to make the play and didn’t get it done. These guys in this league are hard to tackle now. But you’ve got to tackle and you’ve got to tackle them to the ground. Too many times in the games we didn’t do that.”

In the aforementioned Patriots game, both Dion Lewis’s 10-yard touchdown reception and Julian Edelman’s 59-yard touchdown reception featured some embarrassingly sloppy tackling, and it was hardly limited to those two plays. The good news is defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli believes it’s an eminently correctable problem.

“We started all week last week reevaluating our tackling drills,” Marinelli said. “And tackling comes from angles. I think the missed tackles the last couple of weeks, we’ve been overshooting the ball. The angles haven’t been good enough. We can immediately correct that.”