Everything Cowboys want to be was on display in Eagles’ Super Bowl win

Poetic justice. This is not just the name of a song by Super Bowl LIX halftime performer Kendrick Lamar. It is also one way to describe the ending of the 2024 season from the perspective of a Dallas Cowboys fan. The team that reclaimed the NFC East division title over the Cowboys was hardly content with just their fourth straight playoff appearance, taking it all the way to the Super Bowl for the second time in three years, and hoisting the Lombardi trophy by toppling the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22. The Philadelphia Eagles put a stamp on the season by being the absolute best team when it mattered the most, beating another division rival in the Washington Commanders to get there, and leaving the Cowboys’ “all in” effort that saw them on the couch for the entirety of the postseason at 7-10 as something of a new low for America’s Team.

The cherry on top is that in a lot of ways, the Eagles won their second ever championship by being great at a lot of things the Cowboys have either prided themselves on in the past (without similar results of course), or are looking to be great at under Brian Schottenheimer, or both. This was the last game for former Cowboys offensive coordinator Kellen Moore in the same role for the Eagles. He leaves as a Super Bowl champion to pursue his first head coaching gig with the New Orleans Saints, after also interviewing for the Cowboys opening that went to Schottenheimer.

Moore’s offense was a masterclass in being simple but executing at an elite level all season and trusting Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, and Saquon Barkley to win their individual matchups. This alone doesn’t guarantee the fact the Cowboys missed out on hiring their own homegrown talent as their next head coach, but the overall excellence from Nick Sirianni as head coach, Moore as OC, and Vic Fangio as defensive coordinator that steered the Eagles to a Super Bowl by being prepared between the lines, and playing to this advantage on gamedays, certainly leaves the Cowboys behind in yet another way.

Let’s take a look at a few other ways the Eagles beat the Cowboys at their own game to knock off the two-time defending champion Chiefs in New Orleans.

Pressure without blitzing

The Eagles defense sacked Patrick Mahomes six times and did not allow a play of more than 11 yards until the third quarter with a 34-0 lead already in hand. Kansas City only crossed midfield twice in this game, both in the second half while trailing big.

Vic Fangio’s defense did all of this without blitzing a single time, a magnus opus performance for the 66-year old NFL-lifer to get his first Super Bowl ring. The Eagles were able to win the line of scrimmage with just four all night, allowing them to drop into coverage and frustrate the Chiefs passing offense. They intercepted two passes and ran one back for a score to turn a 10-0 game still in question into a 17-0 commanding lead in the blink of an eye.

The Cowboys defense was as its best this past season under Mike Zimmer when blitzing, but that overall approach is expected to change under new DC Matt Eberflus. Like Fangio, Eberflus believes in winning with four up front and adding linebackers and safeties to coverage. Dallas may have the personnel to achieve this if they re-sign Osa Odighizuwa and/or Chauncey Golston, edge rusher Carl Lawson, and add to the position group in both free agency and the draft.

Even still, it is hard to see almost any defense replicating what the Eagles achieved this season, with their turnaround on that side of the ball going a bit deeper than just executing a strong scheme. Philadelphia absolutely collapsed down the stretch of last season to squander a 10-1 start. One of the biggest culprits among many was a complete lack of cohesion on defense. Calls were not being executed, the front seven was not in sync with the backend, and they gave up a slew of big plays because of it all.

Having the mindset to address this failure head on, admit it needed to be fixed, and bring in yet another former head coach as a coordinator to work with Sirianni as the solution is an impressive bit of football operations from GM Howie Roseman. Sirianni allowed both Fangio and Moore to be themselves and teach what they do best. The result was an Eagles defense that picked up more and more of the nuances of Fangio’s unique coverage-based scheme every single week, and by the time the playoffs came around, were ready for the final exam.

The Eagles beat Jordan Love, Matt Stafford, Jayden Daniels, and Patrick Mahomes to win the Super Bowl. Fangio also beat the Cowboys twice in the regular season, extending his personal win streak against America’s Team to four games. Fangio was the head coach in Denver for a 30-16 win in Dallas in Week 9 of 2021, then the defensive coordinator for last year’s Miami win 22-20 at home over the Cowboys, and then beat them twice this past season allowing a combined 13 points in two games.

There were things to like as a Cowboys fan in Zimmer’s one season as defensive coordinator, but in retrospect with the coach coming out of pro football retirement for just one shot at it, the hire felt more like a courtesy towards a familiar coach for the front office in an effort to pair Mike McCarthy with a strong DC following Dan Quinn. Even having a new DC in Eberflus who shares some philosophies with Fangio is not enough to fully bridge the gap, as the Eagles also drafted well, and gave Fangio tools to work with in ways the Cowboys haven’t proven capable of in the player acquisition process.

Dominant Offensive Line

On the other side of the ball in the trenches, the Eagles offensive line was nothing short of dominant all season. They were shades of the “great wall of Dallas” years that are nothing but a distant memory for the Cowboys now, and then some. The average starting height and weight of this unit was the tallest and largest in Super Bowl history, and they imposed their will on Steve Spagnuolo’s defense all game to deny the four-time Super Bowl-winning coordinator his fifth ring.

The Eagles did it without Saquon Barkley even having a statement game. Barkley had the second lowest yard output of his season with just 57, and a long run of 10 yards after going 78 yards for a touchdown against the Rams in the Divisional round and 60 against the Commanders in the Championship. Barkley scored five touchdowns in these two games combined, but none in the Super Bowl.

The Chiefs were left completely lost when it came to deciding when to get aggressive and try to bring pressure against this line, which handled their front with ease. The Eagles leaned on their offensive line to stay in favorable down and distances, control the game with nearly a full quarter more possession time than Kansas City, and allow Jalen Hurts to complete 77% of his passes with just over 10 yards an attempt. The only other game this season where Hurts checked both boxes was a 37-17 blowout over the Bengals where he completed 80% of passes with 11.8 yards per attempt and was not sacked once.

The Cowboys have made a coaching commitment to getting better on the offensive line in support of Dak Prescott coming off yet another season-ending injury, but again the personnel side of it must follow. Retaining Lunda Wells as tight ends coach, hiring former Cardinals OL coach Klayton Adams as offensive coordinator, hiring Kansas State’s Conor Riley as OL coach, and even adding QB coach Steve Shimko with past experience as a TE coach shows Dallas is valuing the importance of winning the line of scrimmage on offense again. Unfortunately, they had five seasons of Mike McCarthy preaching this same importance without the results to follow or many non-first round draft choices up front developing, leaving this area firmly in “wait and see” mode.

As if it needs repeating, at any of the points where the Cowboys did have an offensive line that stacked up with the group the Eagles fielded this season, they never rode it past the Divisional Round of the playoffs. The Eagles smashed teams in the trenches all the way to their second Super Bowl ever since the Cowboys have even appeared in the NFC Championship. Sigh.

Simplicity But Efficiency on Offense

A lot of us would really like to personally ask Jerry Jones how it feels that Kellen Moore is a Super Bowl champion… for the Philadelphia Eagles. Jones’ loyalty to coaches he sees as the underdog, or even just an unlikely story as a potential title winner in Dallas is unmatched. Jason Garrett had a decade as a former player and always heir-apparent to Wade Phillips to make good on Jerry’s loyalty and failed. Mike McCarthy came in with a past Super Bowl win in Jerry’s own stadium, perhaps speeding up the clock on how long he would get to make Dallas a contender, and produced just one Wild Card win. Now it is up to Schottenheimer to pick up the pieces, after apparently appealing so strongly to the front office in the interview process they moved on from bringing back Kellen Moore, interviewed Schottenheimer a second time at length, and hired him.

The chances Schottenheimer has had so far to publicly discuss his vision for a new look Cowboys offense can be summed up by a great song lyric everyone should know. Even the title of the song is fitting towards how Cowboys fans feel about the entire direction of the organization right now.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. – Won’t Get Fooled Again, The Who

Schottenheimer and the Cowboys brass from top to bottom seem convinced the only path to contending with Dak Prescott as the highest-paid player in NFL history now is turning back the clock for him and refocusing on a lot of the things he did well early in his career. An important stretch of this time came when Moore was Prescott’s play caller, and it came with plenty of highs as well as lows such as a lack of diversity in the offense causing the production on that side of the ball to fade dramatically as the season progressed. The Cowboys became easy to scout, too easy to play against, and simply didn’t borrow enough of what’s been working for modern offenses around the league in their own approach to be a real Super Bowl offense despite all the yards and numbers and flashy plays.

Fast forward to Sunday night’s culmination of the Eagles and Moore winning a championship, and the Cowboys are once again made to look a bit foolish. The same simplicity and trusting the reads in front of the quarterback was on display one more time for the Eagles offense on the grandest stage, and it was objectively a thing of beauty no matter where one’s rooting interest lies. When defenses stacked the box against the Eagles, they threw it outside into single coverage. When they played coverage, they ran it with Saquon Barkley. When they tried to disguise one or the other until post snap, they trusted Jalen Hurts to extend plays, take off himself and be unaccounted for as a runner, or find reliable tight end Dallas Goedert as just some of the multiple ways the Eagles were efficient.

While terms like “simplicity” and “unimaginative” were used in very negative ways towards the end of Moore’s tenure with Dallas to describe his offensive approach, they stuck with him and became staples in new ways in Philadelphia. Any coach at any level will tell you if a team takes care of the ball, stays ahead of the chains, and runs it well, they’ll have a chance to win, but nobody ate, breathed, and slept these things like the Eagles on offense with Moore in 2024. He will forever be able to call himself a Super Bowl champion because of the Eagles high level execution in taking the simple and simply being better at it than the defense.

Whatever the Cowboys offense is going to look like under Schottenheimer and OC Klayton Adams, they can only hope for the level of buy-in, attention to detail, and overall success the Eagles found in the blink of an eye with their former OC, while it’s managed to escape Dallas on offense (particularly in the biggest games) for decades. This isn’t to say that making the offense more Prescott-friendly again and resetting how opposing teams will view their matchup against the Cowboys can’t be a good thing, but good enough to get anywhere close to a Super Bowl feels more like Madden talk than reality. Moore and the Eagles almost made it look too easy. In this case, the grass (or Superdome turf) was truly greener on the other side outside of Dallas.

Run The Damn Ball

This has been touched on in every possible way throughout any and all discussions of this Eagles Super Bowl winning season, but they were arguably the most dominant rushing team of all time. Saquon Barkley broke the single-season record for yards when including his run in the playoffs. The Eagles swung big in free agency with Barkley, and showed how just one outside signing paired with continuously strong drafting can propel a team to greatness. There was no single fix to all of the issues that plagued the Eagles a year ago, and many thought that is what they were looking for when signing Barkley as something of a giant band-aid to cover these things up. Boy were all of those people wrong. Barkley was excellent in short yardage, ran tough between the tackles, stood up in pass protection, and to top it all off was a home run threat from the backfield with nothing short of mind-blowing consistency. Week after week, opposing defenses knew their entire game plan had to hinge on having a plan to at least not allow Barkley to race through the secondary and score touchdowns from distance, and week after week they failed.

The marriage between the Eagles massive and talented offensive line and the pure skill and ability to maximize each run from Barkley was truly unstoppable this season. The Cowboys meddled around with having a similar approach early in Ezekiel Elliott’s career, but it was never quite sustainable enough to win in January and February. Now, they have again talked a big talk about wanting to get back to some semblance of being a physical run team, but have the most work out of any position group on the roster in making running back gameday ready right now. Only Deuce Vaughn is under contract for 2025, and while his scheme fit with Adams’ influence as OC is intriguing, not even the Jones’ could be fooled into thinking he’s a featured back (right?).

When Mike McCarthy took over play-calling duties from Kellen Moore, he talked about wanting a more balanced running approach to allow for complementary football with a rested defense. Now, Moore just helped orchestrate a literal run through the competition to a Super Bowl title, and parlayed it into claiming the last head coaching job available for the Saints while McCarthy will sit next season out. McCarthy’s offensive coordinator over his final two seasons with the Cowboys will serve as their next head coach instead of Moore.

The Cowboys need to get on the same page when it comes to how being a great run team again is actually attainable, and the hires under Schottenheimer so far offensively are at least a very positive step in the right direction.

Whether it’s Ashton Jeanty in the first round, a redone tandem involving upcoming free agent Rico Dowdle and a later draft pick, or a free agent splash, the Cowboys had one of the best seats in the house to see how Saquon Barkley singlehandedly turned fortunes for the Eagles. In their own way, they should be looking to do the same.

All phases of player acquisition matter. Having an offensive player better than anyone else on the field matters. The chance for the Cowboys to learn these things, support the existing talent on big contracts they already have on offense, and get back to being a winning team is right in front of them, yet feels so far considering the way the Eagles completed their victory lap against the Chiefs.