Blogging The Boys
The Cowboys will start their season off with back to back division games, something that can be advantageous or disastrous.
If I could make any decree relative to the NFL schedule at large it would be that no division games occur within the first four weeks of the season. My thought process here is that teams, especially nowadays with so little action in the preseason, are still finding themselves and these games are incredibly consequential to overall results.
We cannot seriously expect any team to be their peak version when the season first kicks off. Save those consequential games for when they have found themselves.
Ultimately the NFL disagrees with this idea so rant over. More than disagreeing with the idea, the league also handed the Dallas Cowboys two divisional games to start their season as America’s Team will visit the Philadelphia Eagles and host the New York Giants to start 2025.
Starts like this can be beneficial . If you can begin a season 2-0 with both of those games in your division then you set yourself up with some extra room for error across the campaign as a whole.
There is evidence of this in Cowboys history.
To be clear, NFL history goes back quite a ways and in doing the research for this it felt fair to cut things off at the league’s merger in 1970 for simplicity’s sake. You will note that some of the years we are going to reference are seasons in which what is now the Arizona Cardinals franchise (they have bounced around across history) is a part of the NFC East. Old school fans will remember the Phoenix and even St. Louis days of that team.
With that established, there are 10 instances of the Cowboys beginning a season with consecutive games within their division. They made the playoffs on six of those occasions and even turned one of them into a Super Bowl title at the beginning of their 1990s dynasty.
Amazingly, of all 10 instances there is only a single time in which the Cowboys were skunked and won neither of their divisional contests. That 2000 season was a dark time.
While we can look at the Super Bowl XXVII win as an example of what being 2-0 in division to start the season can do for you, honestly the best example might be the 2015 season. You will recall that the Cowboys beat the Giants and won at Philadelphia to start that year and that Dez Bryant and Tony Romo, respectively, were lost to injury for serious stretches in each contest. That year was a horrific one for the team, one where Romo missed 12 games and the Cowboys lost 11 of them, but they were kept alive in the NFC East race for so long partly because the rest of the division was down, but also partly...
