As it turns out, the Cowboys are in better shape to win the NFC East today than they were three days ago. That’s purely from a mathematical standpoint. From a football standpoint, well, we will have that discussion in just a bit.
Give credit to Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy for one thing. When I asked him late Sunday how damaging his team’s loss in Green Bay was for a club chasing an undefeated team, he laughed. Said not at all. Said there was a lot of football, almost half a season, left. And about 28 hours later, the Washington Commanders had removed the Eagles from that unbeaten perch, and everything in the division was rearranged.
Yes, the Cowboys are still two games behind the Eagles just like they were going into the weekend. And with one week removed from the schedule, that’s not so good. But where Dallas has lost to teams from the NFC North and South, the Eagles suffered a division loss Monday night. That means Dallas will own the tiebreaker if it catches the Eagles and doesn’t lose to New York on Thanksgiving Day or at Washington in the final regular-season game.
And that wasn’t true until now. If the Cowboys had kept winning and the Eagles’ loss was to, say, Tennessee, then Dallas could have tied Philadelphia and still lost the division and been forced to go the wild-card route. That all changed when the Eagles — another team with a leaky run defense — got exposed by a borderline brilliant game plan from the Commanders.
The 32-21 loss snapped the Eagles’ bid for a perfect season and vaulted the Commanders into playoff contention.
Of course, the Eagles lost the turnover battle for the first time all year, and their ability to win that contest eight straight weeks made them one of a kind. Or I should say the third team in more than 80 years to have the turnover edge every week for its first eight games. In other words, it wasn’t going to last. Careful as Jalen Hurts may be, the balls eventually will bounce the other way a time or two. That’s what happened Monday in addition to officials missing a rather glaring face mask call when tight end Dallas Goedert suffered a key fumble.
It happens. No one gets all the breaks.
As for run defense, the Eagles have been almost as bad as the Cowboys all season. Philly ranks 23rd in yards per carry allowed and 20th in yards per game. Dallas is 28th and 29th, a rather critical issue that defensive coordinator Dan Quinn insisted Monday is easily fixable. If so, one wonders why the team has waited until mid-November to address it.
But unlike Dallas, the Eagles’ offense has been so good that opponents have felt little choice but to throw the ball to catch up. Philadelphia had never trailed in the second half before the Washington game. That’s both remarkable on the Eagles’ behalf and an indication this team had faced no real challenges until Monday night.
So perhaps their run defense will be their undoing again. They get a look Sunday at last year’s leading rusher, Indianapolis’ Jonathan Taylor, coming off injury to run for 147 yards at Las Vegas. The Cowboys will see Taylor soon enough but first must deal with Minnesota’s Dalvin Cook (8th in rushing) and the Giants’ Saquon Barkley (1st overall) in a matter of days.
The Cowboys will later tangle with Tennessee’s Derrick Henry (2nd) and the Eagles’ Miles Sanders (10th), and so far the results have not been good against top 10 rushers. In the last two games, Chicago quarterback Justin Fields (6th) ran for 60 yards and a touchdown against Dallas (the Bears didn’t really unleash him until the following week), and in Green Bay Aaron Jones (7th) rambled for 138. Both the Bears and Packers ran for more than 200 yards against Dallas.
So it’s one thing to be in better shape mathematically. It’s something else to say the Cowboys are truly in better position to “get where they want to go” as McCarthy put it after the Green Bay defeat. The reality is the Cowboys are in third place, closer to the Commanders at the bottom of the NFC East than the Eagles at the top.
They have had only one game against a bad Bears’ defense in which the offense has lit the scoreboard the way it did in 2021. When the team needed efficiency with just over two minutes to play in regulation and again in overtime Sunday, the Cowboys’ offense went three-and-out and then turned the ball over on downs before the Packers’ winning field goal.
The Cowboys got a big break Monday night. Or at least the Eagles stopped getting all the breaks. But there are still miles to go before Dallas achieves anything this season, and while the Cowboys may be confident about fixing that run defense, there’s a Vikings receiver named Justin Jefferson who’s a lot better than a Packers rookie named Christian Watson so, yeah ... work to be done for sure.
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