Projected win totals are a tough scene for the Cowboys.
The Super Bowl was played 85 days ago and we still have 122 to go until the regular season kicks off, which means we haven’t even reached the halfway point of the offseason yet.
But free agency came and went, the draft is in the books, and while a lot can happen between now and the start of the regular season, that didn’t stop a Vegas Sportsbook from releasing updated 2025 NFL regular season win totals this week, post draft.
Bet MGM released their NFL Over/Under win totals for all 32 teams on Sunday and they have the Cowboys facing a tough season with just 7.5 wins.
The top teams, with 11.5 projected wins each, are the Ravens, Bills, Chiefs, and Eagles.
Here’s a summary of the win projections for all 32 NFL teams.
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One really cool thing about this projection is that it has seven out of eight division winners from last year repeating as division winners this year (49ers take the NFC West from the Rams). Why would that be cool? Because it would be the first time this has ever happened in the NFL!
In the 22 seasons since realignment in 2002, an average of only 3.5 teams per year repeated as division winners. Only three times, including last year, did six teams repeat. In 18 out 22 seasons (82%) four teams or less repeated at division winners.
So why would a sportsbook put up such an unlikely scenario? Because the oddsmakers are simply trying to provide odds where the action from the betting public will remain even on both sides of the bet. And the betting public, by and large, believes that the most likely outcome in 2025 is going to be largely the same as the 2024 outcome.
It’s called recency bias and is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. But predicting the long-term future based on what has happened in the past is often no more accurate than flipping a coin.
We know that in the NFL, less than half of teams repeat as division winners from year to year, and that an average of about six to seven new teams make it to the playoffs every year. That means only half of each year’s NFL playoff participants make it back to the playoffs the following year. Yet every offseason or pre-season team ranking has last year’s top teams still sitting at the top. Why? Recency bias.
There’s a chance, however remote you feel it is, the Cowboys could end up in the playoffs this year, just as there’s a chance that they could end up behind the Giants in the division. If they do, it has nothing to do with last year’s team, and everything to do with this year’s team.
Can the Cowboys field enough healthy NFL-level cornerbacks at the start of the season, have they done enough to improve their pass rush, can they stop the run (like, at all), is there a WR2 hidden away somewhere on that roster, can somebody run the ball, and is the McCarthy complacency finally and irrevocably out of the building? These are some of the questions that will determine the course of the 2025 season, not where the team finished on the 2024 league tables.
What happened in 2024 stays in 2024. It has no bearing on what has yet to happen in 2025. In the NFL, last year doesn’t matter. Anything can happen in the NFL. The NFL is intrinsically designed to be a parity-driven league; the draft, revenue sharing, the salary cap, compensatory draft picks, all the way through the schedule; everything about the NFL is designed so that every team from every market has a legit opportunity to compete year-in and year-out.
Every year a team that nobody was thinking of as a contender suddenly strings together a couple of wins early in the year, starts playing like a good football team in the middle of the season and actually becomes a good football team as it clinches a playoff spot late in the season.
Could the Cowboys be that team in 2025?
