5 areas the Cowboys need to improve in after the bye week

At 6-2, the Dallas Cowboys are in good shape heading into their bye week — especially considering their starting quarterback has played in just three games. Their latest outing was a 49-29 win over the Chicago Bears which was possibly their most complete game of the season, even if they did surrender more points than they would have liked.

Even with that being the case, there’s always room for improvement and the bye week is the perfect time to focus on that. Here we look at five areas the coaching staff should focus on making improvements for the remainder of the season.

5 areas the Dallas Cowboys need to in improve after the bye

5. Run defense

To their credit, Dallas already knows this is an issue. They enter the bye week ranked 25th in the league in run defense after giving up 1,081 yards so far. In an effort to clean this up, they went after Johnathan Hankins, adding a massive run-stuffer in a trade with the Raiders.

Hankins had three tackles in his first appearance and will surely have more of an impact going forward, but they can’t bank on him alone to fix the issues.

There needs to be more focus on this area from the entire defense. There were a couple of times this past Sunday when even DeMarcus Lawrence took bad angles on Justin Fields, leading to a huge gain. Lawrence is one of the better run defenders on the team — and one of the best defensive ends in this department in the NFL — so this was out of character, but still needs to be cleaned up.