The Cowboys aren’t any closer to contending. But are they closer to the Eagles?
If the Eagles are the team they should be, then the gap between the Birds and Cowboys won’t be a question for long.
What follows might be the most depressing sentence I’ve ever written.
The first NFL Sunday is still a week and a half away.
The only good thing about preseason football is that it eventually ends. Except, this year, the NFL is forcing us to wait until the middle of September until the real games begin. Blame Roger Goodell, or blame the Romans for inventing the Julian Calendar. One thing is for sure: A lot of us will need to find somebody to blame when our significant others find out the Super Bowl is on Valentine’s Day. That, or we should all start casually dropping random comments about the romance inherent in a candlelit breakfast.
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The surest sign that summer needs to end is when people start talking themselves into the Cowboys being anything different than they are every year. In other words, it needed to end two weeks ago, when NFL.com ran a story from longtime analyst Bucky Brooks with a headline that declared: “Cowboys are True Super Bowl Contenders in 2026.”
Brooks isn’t alone. Consider the following heading that ran in the Dallas Morning News a couple of days ago.
David Murphy alerts
Difficulty of Cowboys’ roster cuts signifies their back to being contenders in 2026
Apparently, the Eagles’ practice squad got a good one in Jaydon Blue.
There is a long list of reasons to doubt whether the Cowboys are, in fact, a contender. But before we dive further, let’s first remind ourselves of why it matters. For the last several years, the Cowboys have served as a bellwether of sorts for the Eagles.
Back in 2023, it was the Cowboys’ 33-13 win over the 10-2 Eagles in Dallas that served as the unofficial pronouncement that things really were going south.
You can say the same of Dallas’ 24-21 win last season, the first of a three-game losing streak that left nobody surprised when the Eagles again failed to get out of wild card weekend.
Both of those losses were canaries in a coal mine. They also happen to be Jalen Hurts’ only two losses to Dallas since his first year as a starter. Compare them to 2024, when the Eagles won two games over the Cowboys buy a combined score of 75-13, both in the midst of a stretch where they won 12 of 13 games. They won the Super Bowl that season, you may remember.
The Cowboys have always played a role in defining the Eagles’ season. I would argue the bulk of the emotional component of the rivalry has its roots back when Dallas was America’s Team and the Eagles were searching for an identity in the wake of the Buddy Ryan Era. James Willis, Mike Mamula, etc. Beating the Cowboys felt awfully good when they were a team full of talkers like Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders and Jimmy Johnson. How many Eagles from those teams do you still see on national television every week?
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The dynamic has shifted. The Eagles have two Super Bowl berths in three years, two Super Bowl wins in eight. They have appeared in eight conference championships since the last time the Cowboys appeared in one. It is now Dallas that can look back on a 7-9-1 season and say that at least they helped show that the Eagles weren’t as good as everyone thought they were.
Which brings us to 2026. There are plenty of intriguing storylines confronting these Eagles as they head into another post-Super-Bowl hangover season. Hanging over all of them is one overarching question: Are they still a team that should be expecting to win games against teams like the Cowboys?
That is the litmus test, after all. The longer you look at the Eagles’ schedule, the more you realize that the strength of it depends on how you evaluate the other three teams in the division. The Eagles are 33-15 against NFC opponents over the last four seasons. Three of those losses have come against the Cowboys, one of them with Gardner Minshew at quarterback.
The Commanders stink. If the Eagles are anything less than convincing in Week 1, we will know they have problems. The Giants suddenly have an adult in the room in John Harbaugh. But he may be the only one. The first barometer of that we can still pencil in three wins and possibly four right there. If that does not prove to be the case, then it will say something.
The real question is whether the gap has closed or will soon close between the Eagles and Cowboys. If so, it will be due more to the lowering of the tide than the rising of it. Of the Cowboys’ seven wins last season, six came against teams that won fewer than seven games. The combined record of those teams was 21-64. The lone exception was their win over the Eagles.
Nothing about the Cowboys’ roster or coaching staff suggests they are anything different from what they have been the last five years. Twice they have finished with the NFL’s highest-scoring offense. They have been top five in either points or yards in four of those five years. Three times they have finished with a top seven scoring offense and scoring defense in the same season. Their run defense is better after the midseason addition of defensive tackle Quinnen Williams. But the secondary still stinks. And the pass rush is questionable.
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I suppose it says something that the gap between the Eagles and Cowboys is an open question. How can it not be after a near-loss in Week 1 and then the loss in Week 12?
Put it this way: If the Eagles are the team they should be, then it won’t be a question for long.
