Cowboys' final 2 games are warning of 'very difficult' NFC East future that awaits

PHILADELPHIA — When the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles walked off Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday afternoon, both teams clinched something.

The Eagles locked up the NFC East, continuing the division’s streak of no repeat champion over the past 20 years. Philadelphia was the last team to do that when it won four consecutive division titles from 2001 through 2004.

The Cowboys clinched a losing season, their fourth one since the division’s run of parity in the mid-2000s.

Based on the trends, the Cowboys’ chances of capturing the division in 2025 seem reasonable. The last two times Dallas finished with a losing record — 2015 (4-12) and 2020 (6-10) — it won the division the next year. But all of that is much easier said than done.

“It’s going to be tough,” Cowboys star pass rusher Micah Parsons said. “I look at Jayden Daniels as a franchise quarterback, so I’m going to be facing him for the next 18 years of my life. You got (Jalen) Hurts who is a franchise guy. Every team pretty much got a franchise guy that I’m going to have to get used to. And the (New York) Giants, they might go ahead and get a franchise guy. It’s going to be a very difficult next couple of years.”

For the bulk of the Dak Prescott era, the NFC East has been a two-team race between the Eagles and Cowboys. Those two teams have finished in the top two every year since 2017, except for a strange 2020 year in which the Taylor Heinicke-led Washington Commanders won the division, the Giants finished second and made the playoffs and the Cowboys and Eagles finished third and fourth, respectively.

The path to regain the division crown looks to be much tougher for the Cowboys than what it’s been for much of the past two decades. Hosting the Giants in Week 18, the Eagles could finish with their second 14-win season in three years (they went 11-6 in 2023). The Philly train doesn’t look like a flash in the pan, nor does it appear to be slowing down. Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith and Saquon Barkley are all 27 or younger.

It would be wise to exercise caution before crowning the Commanders. A competitive era seemed to be on the horizon in 2012, when Robert Griffin III broke out as a rookie, but it fell flat. C.J. Stroud had a phenomenal rookie year in 2023 for the Houston Texans but struggled a bit more this season. The rookie quarterback hype train comes fast and furious but doesn’t always maintain speed. Still, everything Daniels has shown this year indicates that he’ll have that team in a competitive spot, assuming good health and growth around him. For the Commanders to show the kind of progress this year — after finishing last in the division in each of the past two seasons — is remarkable, especially in Dan Quinn’s first season.

In a division the Cowboys have been part of a 1-2 punch with relative ease in recent history, they’re going to have to work to not fall to No. 3.

“One, we’re going to have to get healthy,” Parsons said. “We got three or four starters who aren’t coming back until (middle) of next season. We’ve got to plan for that, we’ve got to get healthy. We’ve got to keep coming together. It’s going to be a tough point.”

Watching the Eagles wipe the floor with the Cowboys, it was hard not to see how that team was constructed.

• Barkley, who crossed 2,000 yards for the season against the Cowboys, was a priority free-agent signing.

• Brown, who caught a touchdown in the third quarter one play after he almost had a spectacular catch for a touchdown, is over 1,000 yards on the season, a mark he’s passed in each season since the Eagles traded for him in the 2022 offseason. Darius Slay was a trade acquisition, too.

• Even with talent that arrived via trade or free agency — or in the case of C.J. Gardner-Johnson (he picked off Cooper Rush twice Sunday), acquired once in a trade and once as a free agent — the Eagles have still drafted well. Jalen Hurts was a second-round pick, as was guard Landon Dickerson. They hit on first-round picks Smith and Jalen Carter.

Eagles general manager Howie Roseman has used the mantra Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones often repeats — player acquisition being a “365-day” thing — and actually applied it beyond lip service.

As the Cowboys play out their final games, the opponents serve as a warning bell. The Eagles dominated the Cowboys in Week 17, and the Commanders come to town as the final act in Week 18. These are the teams the Cowboys will have to reckon with for the foreseeable future.

If the front-office plan is to fall back on what’s comfortable, play things safe and fill out the edges, there’s a risk that comes with it, especially when other teams actively get better. The Cowboys have to be careful to not fall out of a competition for a division they’ve regularly been in the mix to win.

(Photo of Nick Sirianni and Mike McCarthy: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)