Blogging The Boys
There is not a lot of faith in the Cowboys heading into the new season.
This isn’t going to be a good year for the Dallas Cowboys. We might as well just pack up shop and head home because there won’t be much to cheer for this upcoming season. At least, that’s the mindset of many of the NFL so-called experts when it comes to their season predictions.
The NFL oddsmakers aren’t putting a lot of faith in the Cowboys, offering up 50 to 1 odds for them to win the Super Bowl. A ten-dollar dart throw bet could be worth 500 bones should the Cowboys shock the world and take home that long-coveted sixth Lombardi trophy.
While winning the Super Bowl might seem outlandish, they have the Cowboys' win total projection at a mere 7.5 games this season. If that seems low to you, that’s because it is. In fact, you’d have to go back over 20 years to find a season where they had a win total projection this low. Marcus Mosher from Locked on Cowboys rounded up the data since the turn of the century. Plotting win projections by year gives us the following graph...
This graph is telling for a handful of reasons. For starters, it’s a testament to how consistently well the team has performed over the last two decades to have to go back to 2003 for them to be projected to have a losing record. Before the 2003 season, the Cowboys were coming off three-straight seasons under head coach Dave Campo, where they finished with a 5-11 record. The skepticism was justified. Fortunately, the Cowboys brought on Bill Parcells to right the ship, and they finished the year 10-6 and returned to the playoffs for the first time in the 2000s.
The stretch from 2004 to 2024 was pretty amazing.
Over the last two decades, people expected the Cowboys to be aight, but never bad and never great. It feeds the mediocre narrative that has haunted this team for so long. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Often the divisional playoff game, never the conference championship game.
Sadly, the Cowboys have dropped below the water line for the first time since the dreaded dark ages of the early 2000s. Why have the NFL experts suddenly turned on the Cowboys?
Maybe they’re fed up with Jerry Jones. His never-ending antics of dragging out contracts, providing stadium tours, and not even supplying curtains to keep the sun out on game day are holding this team back. At least, that’s what people say. His stubbornness in not hiring a real general manager, allowing himself and Stephen Jones to navigate through the roster-building process,...
