Cowboys have path to playoffs this season.
I realize that a team that hasn’t won consecutive games since last December shouldn’t be talking about playing meaningful games this December. But it’s a strange year, even by NFL standards, and Sunday’s upending of the Super Bowl champs has folks thinking that more victories are on the way. The ESPN Power Index gives the Cowboys a 30 percent chance of reaching the playoffs. I think it might be even higher. Let’s go all the way to 32. And we should also fix one myth about this team that may have been propagated from this very space.
Peeling back the curtain just a bit, we have two deadlines when we write stories about the Cowboys on night games. In the column I filed at 11:05, roughly 40 minutes after the Eagles were stopped inside the 10-yard line, I said that at 4-5 the Cowboys already had forfeited their wild-card hopes, that their only playoff chance was based on winning the NFC East.
I said that, thinking more of the general rule, since only the 2016 Detroit Lions (9-7) have earned an NFC wild card since 2010 without at least 10 wins. In fact, over the last 10 years, 11 of the 20 NFC wild cards have had at least 11 wins. You can occasionally win a downtrodden division with nine wins, but wildcard trips are rare.
But after a brief examination of the current situation, I removed that line from the column that was sent at 12:05. Right now the Cowboys are two games behind Washington (6-3) for the NFC East lead. The two wild cards as of today would be Carolina (6-3) and Minnesota (5-3-1). The only other wild card competitor with a better record than the Cowboys is Green Bay at 4-4-1.
Dallas’ loss to 4-5 Seattle hurts, but we’ll have to see what the Seahawks look like in December. Of the teams above Dallas, the Carolina Panthers, in particular, seems like a team that could stumble down the stretch.
I have fewer doubts about Minnesota because of Mike Zimmer’s strong defense. But the Vikings haven’t played their division leaders yet, so who knows what might happen in two games with the surprising Chicago Bears?
All that says is that 2018 could be a year where nine wins gets you the second NFC wild-card spot. The next hurdle, of course, is getting the 4-5 Cowboys to that nine-win plateau, and it’s not simple. The most popular line of thinking goes something like this: Dallas finds a path (choose whichever one you like) to split its next four games with Atlanta, Washington, New Orleans and Philadelphia.
But the idea is to get through that stretch with a split and then streak into the playoffs with the “easy” finish of Indianapolis, Tampa Bay and the New York Giants.
I’m not a total believer in this scenario. Just embrace the knowledge that the Cowboys didn’t bury themselves Sunday night in Philadelphia. \