Red zone play, and particularly the red zone play-calling, has been a favorite whipping boy for the Cowboys’ offensive struggles for a couple of years now, so it may be worth refreshing our memories about how good or bad the Cowboys actually were in the red zone over the last few of years.

The traditional way of measuring red zone performance is Red Zone Touchdown Percentage (RZ TD%), which measures how often a team scores a TD on a drive that entered the red zone on at least one play. But you can see from the table above that it’s far from a perfect measure.Take 2025. The Cowboys RZ TD% of 57% last year ranked “only” 18th in the league. Yet compared to the No. 1 red zone offense in 2022, the Cowboys were short by only three TDs. And in terms of the number of red zone drives, 2025 matches the record-breaking 2021 scoring offense. So as a pure performance indicator, RZ TD % can be a bit misleading.
Perhaps a better way to think of RZ TD% is as a “meat-left-on-the bone” stat. League-wide, an elite red zone offense generally operates above a 65% touchdown conversion rate, so the 2025 offense left a lot of meat on the bone relative to some other teams in the league.

Consider that the 2025 Cowboys ranked seventh in total points scored and second in total yards. So they were definitely a prolific offense, but despite those gaudy numbers, many Cowboys fans felt uneasy as soon as the Cowboys made it into the red zone, fearful that this would just be another drive that would stall a few yards short of the end zone.

And that eye-test, though notoriously fickle and unreliable, is not wrong. The Cowboys did get bogged down way more in the red zone than their high-octane, between-the-20s offense would have led you to believe. So let’s walk through a handful of metrics to understand what was going on in the red zone.

Red zone drives vs total drives
The Cowboys had 177 total drives last year, which ranked a middling 17th in the league. This is not necessarily a number that the offense controls by itself. The ability of the defense to get the ball back quickly (non-existent in 2025) and the opponent both influence that number. Still, the Cowboys took 65 of those drives into the red zone, and that RZ drive conversion percentage of 36.7% ranks the Cowboys a comfortable fifth in the league, pretty much in line with where they rank as a scoring offense.

Red Zone Scoring Efficiency
RZ TD% only measures TDs and ignores field goals. And while scoring a TD is the optimal outcome of a RZ drive, each time a FG is kicked, it isn’t worth as much as a TD, but still counts for something. If you consider that total red zone drives multiplied by seven (and ignoring two-point conversions) is the maximum scoring potential, then you can measure your total scoring (TDs x 7, FGs x3) as a percentage of that maximum with this simple formula