The Dallas Cowboys deserve the best leftovers in the world after their Thanksgiving Day win against the Kansas City Chiefs. Hopefully yours are tasting delicious as the victory celebration rolls on.
Things feel as great as they have in a long time with the Cowboys with the Chiefs win serving as the team’s third in a row. Talk of playoffs is no longer met with rolled eyes. Smiles are all around. Welcome to the holiday season!
Even though the Cowboys just played on a Thursday, they will not have any sort of mini-bye as they visit the Detroit Lions next Thursday night. If they are able to win that game then optimism is going to reach an insane level, but we will have those conversations when the time is right.
For now we are still basking in the win that was and one of the ways we do that is through the lens of the past. Thanks to Pro Football Reference and Stathead we can assess what the current Cowboys are doing with respect to both franchise and NFL history at large.
Welcome to this week’s Historical Notes. Let’s begin.
Hat trick winning streaks are fun
The Cowboys have won three games in a row and have done so for the first time since late in the 2023 season, so it has been a bit. That span also included a Thanksgiving Day win and ultimately got to as large as five games as the team moved into December.
This may sound like an arbitrary number, but a hat trick is something that every Cowboys team from 2016 through 2023 had accomplished. At one point or another literally every one of those eight teams won three games in a row.
The 2024 team did not (they did win four out of five late in the season though, just for context, that Bengals game ruined the potential for this specific occurrence) and at long last the 2025 team has.
This is a rare quarterback season
Through the first 12 games of the season the Cowboys have seen Dak Prescott throw 25 touchdown passes. That is obviously a ton.
This is only the fifth instance since 1970 of a Cowboys quarterback doing this. Dak himself did it two years ago during the season he finished runner-up for MVP and the color analyst from the Thanksgiving Day in Tony Romo did it three times.
Of the previous four seasons where this happened, three are pretty all-time as far as Cowboys years throughout The Drought™. 2007 was arguably the best team to fail to reach the NFC Championship Game and 2014 may have provided the biggest heartbreak in not doing so. That 2023 group was quite talented as well, but we all know what happened.
It will forever sting that the 2008 team didn’t even make the playoffs. But let’s stay positive!
Javonte Williams has been a breath of fresh air
Javonte Williams has been a revelation this season. His season is the 25th for the Cowboys since 1970 where a player has amassed 900 rushing yards through the first 12 games of a season.
Consider that the Cowboys had not had a runner reach this mark at this point in a season since Ezekiel Elliott did in 2019. They went the entire Mike McCarthy era (to contextualize things here) without this kind of performance on the ground.
George Pickens is quite rare
On the subject of starts (a weird word to be using relative to a season after Thanksgiving, but you get the point), George Pickens has been incredible.
Pickens is now the sixth player since 1970 to have 1,100 yards and eight touchdowns receiving in a player’s first 12 games with an NFL team.
This is some pretty impressive company.
Comparing Pickens’ season to Cowboys history specifically…
I wanted to see how many Cowboys receivers have put up 1,100 yards through the first 12 games of a season which Pickens has done as noted. There are only four (since 1970) and the list is pretty special.
Pickens is only 40 yards behind but a touchdown ahead of what CeeDee Lamb did in his stellar 2023 season. Interestingly that season led to offseason payment for Lamb (even if it took until the eleventh hour) and it appears that this is where things are headed for Pickens.
That is for another day, though.
The offense was humming on Thanksgiving
The Cowboys offense reached 450 total yards and 30 points on Thanksgiving. This marked the second time this season where the team has met those offensive thresholds in a given game.
Consider that 2025 is the first season where Dallas has done this multiple times since 2021 (that first 2022 listing was the final game of the 2021 season, don’t get confused). These are some arbitrary numbers as this exercise can prove to be sometimes, but it is impressive nonetheless.
It was a unique defensive outing
The Cowboys held the Chiefs under 365 total yards of offense and did so without generating a turnover. I always find things like this interesting because turnovers could explain that if Dallas just kept taking the ball away. Know what I mean?
This game marked the first time that Dallas held a team south of 365 without generating any turnovers and won the game since Thanksgiving Day in 2022 against the Giants.
Happy anniversary, I guess!
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