The Dallas Cowboys have a fine record, but just how close are they to being an elite NFL team with real hopes of lifting the Lombardi Trophy?.
Bill Parcells used to say “you are what your record says you are.” There is something to be said for the bullshit-cutting simple math of that statement, especially from one of football’s all-time great masterminds — a man who helped resurrect the Dallas Cowboys from a hopeless morass of ineptitude 20 years ago. But after the Cowboys’ 28-23 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, we’re not so sure we can keep things that simple, with all apologies to Parcells.
The 2023 NFL season is already half over, and at 5-3 the Cowboys still have a clear path to a third consecutive playoff berth. That alone might be enough to just stop and conclude that the Cowboys are a good team. When Mike McCarthy took over as head coach in 2020, the team seemed to be mired in a dull kind of back-and-forth: one year they’d make the playoffs and the next year they’d miss out. Regardless, the results were the same: no Super Bowl trophy.
A good team? OK. A great team? Not so fast.
But maybe Parcells was onto something. Only the team that beat Dallas on Sunday, the hated Eagles, have but a single defeat, and just behind them, the defending Super Bowl Champs Kansas City Chiefs and perennial contender Baltimore Ravens reside at 7-2. A record of 5-3 is pretty good, but pretty good typically does not translate into Super Bowl appearances.
Last season, the ‘Boys were 6-2 after their first eight games. In 2021, 6-2 through the first half as well. Both of those seasons ended up in embarrassing losses to the San Francisco 49ers in the early rounds of the playoffs. If the Texas Rangers’ victory in the World Series has taught us anything, it’s that the records of the previous two seasons don’t necessarily mean much when it comes to predicting the results of the current year. Nonetheless, it’s hard to avoid feeling as if we’ve seen this movie multiple times in a short span.
On Monday morning, ESPN led its coverage of the game with the headline, “Cowboys not discouraged by loss to Eagles.” The article went on to note pivotal moments when the ‘Boys were inches away from turning things around. Dak Prescott’s foot just barely out of bounds during a two-point conversion attempt; tight end Luke Schoonmaker’s knee, again, just barely, landing on the wrong side of the end zone on a monumentally important fourth-down play; and Micah Parsons (yes, just barely) missing out on recovering a Philly fumble late in the game were all major near-misses.
Bob Sturm of 1310 the Ticket posted a video from Cowboys beat reporter John Machota to X (formerly Twitter) that shows just how close the Schoonmaker catch came to being a touchdown. Sturm added that he wished the rules were such that the play had been called a touchdown, but in 2023, they are not.
Even if it it’s reasonable to suggest those inches were the difference between a win and a loss, and it’s probably not, that’s yet another indication that this team just isn’t the elite club that oddsmakers and league experts predicted them to be when the season began. Over the course of an NFL season, every team can point to inches and moments that, had they been slightly altered, would’ve led to a different outcome, good or bad.
Narrowly missed field goals as time expires, a flubbed extra point in the first half, a dropped interception, a kick return that was one missed tackle away from being a touchdown are all things that pretty much any team goes through over the span of a few games, let alone an entire season. In 2022, the average margin of victory was an all-time low at 9 points. This year, that margin is a bit higher at 12.1 points. As a result, there aren’t many teams in the league not spending their Mondays counting the inches they missed out on turning into points.
You know which teams aren’t spending their off days counting those inches and relishing moral victories? The Eagles and Chiefs — the elite teams.
Even though we’ve nearly talked ourselves into adopting Parcells’ cold logic to explain where this team stands currently, there’s also something to be taken from the losses, above and beyond how many there have been. By losing badly to the San Francisco 49ers and then to the Eagles, the Cowboys have failed in both the games that offered a true test of how they stack up against their most dangerous opponents. Those two results also mean the team doesn’t have a truly impressive win on their resume.
As we noted a few weeks ago, we do believe a win is a win, and when it comes time to clinch a playoff berth, the record is indeed all that matters. But when looking for signs of encouragement after Week 9, it’s hard to feel too great about wins over the Rams and Chargers, teams who do not represent the caliber of opponents the Cowboys will face in the postseason, assuming they make it.
For those who don’t want to panic, we understand. If you want to stick with the simplicity of “you are what your record says you are,” it’s only fair to point out that you must also accept the record of the team ahead of you. Right now, the Cowboys are two games behind the Eagles in the loss column, a spot they were in much of last year as well.
Simple math tells us it’s going to be tough to make up that ground, even though Philly has a difficult schedule remaining. It’s understandable to think the Cowboys will not win the division, and instead will again be looking at another tough playoff matchup in the wild-card round while the Eagles rest and recuperate during a week off.
So, as it turns out, we’ve talked ourselves into it: the old coach is right. The Cowboys are what their record says they are. Right now, that’s a team that isn’t bad, but is more than a few inches from being great.
