Blogging The Boys
Vegas thinks it’s going to be all uphill for the Cowboys in 2025
The worst teams in the NFC, according to 2026 Super Bowl odds released by the oddsmakers at BetMGM, are, in order:
A mere five days ago, the owner assured me the Cowboys are in “win now” mode, but the oddsmakers seem to see next season as more of a rebuild season than anything else.
There are lots of things that can change between now and the end of the 2025 season, but these odds are a strong indicator that the betting public believes the window for the Cowboys to be a Super Bowl contender is firmly closed, and may be for the foreseeable future.
The Cowboys have 22 unrestricted free agents heading into 2025, Stephen Jones regularly goes into a fetal position at the start of free agency and plays “How Soon Is Now” by The Smiths for days on end, their draft record over the last few years is spotty at best, and they continue to “act like a franchise that doesn’t know how to manage the cap.”
Where’s the help for this team going to come from? A first-year head coach and some players coming back from injury and staying healthy? That’s it?
No wonder the oddsmakers are kicking the Cowboys into the NFL’s trash bin of non-playoff contenders.
Of course, the Cowboys could prove all their doubters wrong too. They could add key pieces in free agency, they could draft immediate impact players, they could pry open the salary cap purse strings Stephen is clutching so tightly. They could even pay a running backs coach more than he is making as a college coach - no, sorry, my bad, that’s pushing it too far.
Normally, this is the time of year where you put last season in the rearview mirror and where every single one of the 32 NFL teams gets excited about what they’re doing, and every single fan base starts believing that if things work out just the right way, their team will make the playoffs. This is the time of year where hope springs eternal and everybody feels optimistic about the new season, except that’s very hard as a Cowboys fan right now.
But then again, last year may not matter as much as we think. Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. Because it’s easier, our minds are hardwired to use our recent experience as the baseline for what will happen in the future. In many situations, this bias works just fine, especially if you’re making short-term predictions. Even for highly changeable events like the weather (“It was cold today, it’s probably going to be cold tomorrow again”) or the stock market, making short-term predictions according to events in...
