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.
- 100% of the time, they were projected to have a winning record
- 71% of the time, they were projected to have at least nine wins
- 24% of the time, they were projected to have double-digit wins
- 0% of the time were they projected to have 11 wins or more
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, has kept them from hanging with the big boys of the NFL. At least, that’s what people say.
Maybe it’s not Jones who is the deterrent. Maybe the experts feel like getting rid of Mike McCarthy was a huge mistake. Instead, the team is counting on first-time head coach Brian Schottenheimer. As respected as he may be, Schotty is a new coach. Nobody knows what to expect with him. All we know is he’s not Ben Johnson or Pete Carroll or Mike Vrabel or anyone whose name alone inspires confidence that good things are coming.
Or, maybe it’s Dak Prescott. One of the most talked about quarterbacks over the last several years, Prescott has been highly praised and repeatedly drug through the mud to the point that you almost feel like he’s two different players. Recency bias is a huge influencer, and right now, Dak’s recency isn’t all that decency.
Who knows what concerns the experts have about the Cowboys’ chances this year. Maybe they feel their schedule is just too difficult, including four games against the two teams that represented the NFC in the conference championship game, is going to be a buster.
The last time people counted the Cowboys this low, they surprised people. They finally found a good head coach in Parcells, had a nice draft (selected Jason Witten and Terence Newman), and even made an offseason trade to get a WR2 (Terry Glenn). If the Cowboys have made similar impactful moves, things could be on the up and up for this football team.
