The 3-4-1 Dallas Cowboys might still be living just on the edge of “must win” territory going into their first Monday Night Football game of the season, but winning the games you’re supposed to is always a hallmark of teams with real playoff viability. The Cowboys upcoming three-week stretch will include two such games they need to win in the worst way, both on Monday nights. Dallas can start to be taken slightly more seriously this season with primetime wins in front of national audiences, not because of the perceived quality of these wins, but because they would have a winning record for the first time in 2025 ahead of tougher spotlight games on Thanksgiving against the Chiefs, a Thursday night in December at the Lions followed by a Sunday night against the Vikings, and Christmas at the Commanders.
In order for this tougher stretch to truly define who this year’s Cowboys are, they will first need to beat the Arizona Cardinals playing without starting QB Kyler Murray. This would set up a Week 11 game at the struggling Las Vegas Raiders.
It would be their first win against the Cardinals since a different Monday night in 2017 under Jason Garrett, that one coming on the road against Carson Palmer starting at QB for Arizona. It will be Jacoby Brissett making his first career start against the Cowboys this time, and also his first on a Monday night.
The Cowboys trying to snap a three-game losing streak to the Cardinals will still be enough of a challenge, but certainly gets a lift in what will now be a Dak Prescott versus Jacoby Brissett game from AT&T Stadium. Kyler Murray was previously 9-0 in this stadium, so the Cowboys not having the burden of trying to finally end this streak with a defense that hardly looked up to the challenge last week against the Broncos is another thing working in their favor.
Brissett is in his first season with the Cardinals, and has started their last two games against the Colts and Packers. The Cardinals had a fourth quarter lead in both games, with Brissett throwing a combined four touchdowns to one interception and completing over 60% of his passes in both. Tight end Trey McBride was Arizona’s leader in targets and catches against both Indianapolis and Green Bay, also catching three of Brissett’s four touchdown passes.
The Cardinals will come into this game off their bye, having lost five games in a row. How much the bye will serve them establishing Brissett into the offense even further will be found out at game time, because early in the week it seemed like Murray would have a chance to practice and play. Another loss for the Cardinals would match their longest losing streak under third-year head coach Jonathan Gannon, who came over from being the Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive coordinator. The defensive minded coach will have a hard time coming out on top scheming against a Cowboys offense that’s been great at home once again, but even down to their backup quarterback the Cardinals have reasons to be confident hanging in the game with their own offense going up against Matt Eberflus’ defense.
It’s time to again break out the crystal ball and look ahead at what the Cowboys need to do to win, and what could send them to their first losing streak under Brian Schottenheimer against the Cardinals.
The Dallas Cowboys will beat the Arizona Cardinals if…
they continue their success against Jonathan Gannon defenses.
The Cowboys own defense will get to work on some things over the next three weeks against the Cardinals, during the ensuing bye week, and then at the Raiders, but it remains extremely unlikely they’ll collectively do enough to shift the identity of this team. The Cowboys under Schottenheimer have yet to shake the McCarthy-era identity that their best chance to stack wins is by relying on a Prescott-led passing game in home games, especially against porous defenses.
Scoring at least 40 points in each home game this season, and knowing the Cardinals have not scored more than 27 points in either game started by Brissett, the Cowboys offense simply needs to take care of business to control this game and get back in the win column.
If they do so, a later conversation going into the bye will surely be had about how much the Cowboys really proved by winning in this familiar way that rarely works against upper echelon competition, but even that is a better conversation than talking about a team that started the season with promise dropping to 3-5-1.
The crux point in the season where Schottenheimer’s offense will have to prove it can do what neither McCarthy’s or Kellen Moore’s regularly couldn’t and adapt to the attrition of a long season is right around the corner. A big performance on this side of the ball against the Cardinals with both the ground and pass game would be a nice step in the right direction in this category. It would also mean Schottenheimer was able to pick up where past Cowboys offenses have left off scheming against Jonathan Gannon defenses. As mentioned, Gannon left the Eagles to take the Cardinals head coaching job in 2023.
When it comes to remembering matchups between the Cowboys offense and Eagles defense, the more recent domination by Vic Fangio defenses in Philly against Dallas may come to mind first. Prior to this though, the Cowboys had success against Gannon’s defenses. In his two seasons with the Eagles, the Cowboys won three of four matchups. The Cowboys swept the season series in 2021 with 41-21 and 56-21 wins. They beat the Eagles in Arlington 40-34 in 2022.
Gannon’s one game as Cardinals head coach against the Cowboys went better for his team defensively, a 28-16 Cardinals win in 2023. Dallas was banged up on the offensive line in this game, but still put up solid offensive numbers. Getting a push in the red zone proved difficult though, making the difference in the loss. The Gannon defense will leave their corners on islands and is aggressive in man coverage, allowing the ball to be thrown over their head a lot. It’s easy to see why they can tighten up in the red zone on a shortened field because of this style, but in this Monday’s matchup against a fully healthy CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens, the Cowboys will be thinking about scoring from outside the red zone.
In the Cardinals last game before the bye, they started rookie cornerback Will Johnson and second-year draft pick Max Melton in the secondary. Jordan Love, and in the week before Daniel Jones, were able to find completions all over the field against this secondary. The Packers only faced ten third-down attempts while the Colts only needed third down eight times. Both quarterbacks were only sacked once.
The opportunity will more than be there for the Cowboys to stay on schedule and unlock all of the elements of their offense in the run, pass, and play action game on Monday night to at least keep positive momentum under their latest play caller in Schottenheimer, and hopefully enough of it to get back in the win column under the lights.
The Dallas Cowboys will lose to the Arizona Cardinals if…
they have no answer for TE Trey McBride.
It is easy to say that any offensive player from an opposing team should worry Cowboy fans going against this defense, but Trey McBride and Marvin Harrison Jr. are the top options for the Cardinals. Playing against Brissett and not Murray, the rushing threat is still slightly there with Brissett, but not nearly to the same level as Murray. This is much more of a “see it, throw it” type of pocket passer the Cowboys are playing against on Monday. When a quarterback like this has big-bodied targets like McBride and Harrison Jr., finding completions can come easy. The Cowboys will need to limit these completions to short and medium gains, then hunt for pass rush opportunities against Brissett who’s been sacked eight times in his two starts.
McBride is a potential problem in every facet of this game plan. The idea of him running routes against either Kenneth Murray or any other Dallas linebacker is terrifying. The poor all-around tackling the Cowboys showed against the Broncos plays into McBride’s ability to be more of a receiver than a tight end after the catch. The instant chemistry he’s apparently found with Brissett, and the Cardinals having an extra week to study how they’ll unleash him against this suspect Cowboys defense, are also concerns.
The Cowboys have used their own offense piling up points as their best pseudo-defense in home games to get opponents out of their run game, but doing so for the pass against both McBride and Harrison isn’t plausible. The Cardinals are going to look to get the ball to these play makers constantly. Still, taking the trio of Brissett, McBride, and Harrison Jr. to outduel Prescott, Pickens, and Lamb in this way would be an upset.
The Cowboys defense doesn’t need to right all of their wrongs from the debacle in Denver on Monday (of which there were many), they just need to not let specifically Trey McBride be a game wrecker they have no answers for.
McBride leads all tight ends in the NFL this season in percentage of their team’s passing yards at fractions shy of 28%. The next closest TE is Sam LaPorta for the Lions at just over 17.5%.
Dallas has both scheme and personnel concerns when it comes to how they’ll be able to slow down McBride off this production. The latter will have help in the coming weeks in the form of DeMarvion Overshown on track to return from injury, but the former must be fixed by Eberflus to prove the Cowboys can use wins against the Cardinals and later the Raiders to actually build any momentum.
The Cowboys defense is mainly responsible for painting the team into this near must-win corner, and if having the support of an offense playing at home with favorable matchups all over the field against the Cardinals isn’t enough to slow a Cardinals offense without their starting QB, getting out of that corner at all will feel like a task for 2026 as opposed to an ongoing goal for this current team.
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