Blogging The Boys
Things look bleak for the Cowboys right now. They lost consecutive games for the first time this season and then went off to their bye. They’ve had to sit with that feeling for a full week now, and on top of it they’ve watched the Eagles rip off their third straight win. According to the prediction model from The Athletic, Dallas has just a 7% chance of making the postseason right now.
But there is still hope.
The road from here is pretty challenging. Monday night’s game against a struggling Raiders team is the easier battle, but after that they face the Eagles, Chiefs, and Lions over the course of just 12 days. After their mini-bye following that gauntlet, they’re “rewarded” with home games against the Vikings and Chargers before finishing off with two divisional contests.
Odds won’t be great for the Cowboys in any of those games. They’re favored over the Raiders, as a visitor, but that may be the last time the odds will favor them until they go to New Jersey in Week 18. Perhaps they’ll be favorites over the Commanders the week before, depending on the long-term prognosis of injured quarterback Jayden Daniels, but that’s probably it.
So how can there possibly be any hope of a playoff run when the schedule is so stacked against them? One must only look inward, to when the Cowboys pulled off something similar just seven years ago.
I’m talking, of course, about the 2018 season. Where the team is at in 2025 has almost perfectly mirrored where they were at in 2018 at this point. The 2018 Cowboys were caught in a vicious cycle of winning and then losing, starting the season off 3-4 before losing to the Titans to give them their first consecutive losses on the year. They even came close to a tie, falling to the Texans in overtime in Week 5.
Something changed at 3-5, though. The Cowboys came out on the road against the Eagles (who, just like in 2025, were reigning Super Bowl champions) and won. They then went to Atlanta and pulled out a victory. Suddenly, they started playing with confidence. A Thanksgiving win over Washington led straight into a home game with the Saints, who had not lost since the season opener.
The Cowboys won, making them one of just three teams that year to beat the Saints; the third team to beat them did so in Week 17, when New Orleans rested their starters.
Following the morale boost of upsetting the Saints, an overtime win over the Eagles followed. Suddenly, they’d ripped off five straight, with three of them being divisional games and all of them being conference games. A shutout on the road against the Colts – whose elite defense was run by none other than Matt Eberflus – was a brief setback, but it being an AFC opponent did little to affect the Cowboys’ playoff push.
Wins over the Buccaneers and Giants solidified things: the Cowboys won the...
