Halloween weekend is fast approaching, and for a Dallas Cowboys team desperate to stack wins for the first time this season, there may be no spookier, scarier sight than the Arizona Cardinals coming to town. Yeah, seriously.
Even within a bad NFC East division, the Cowboys have created a small margin of error to lose games they’re supposed to win, having already dropped such games to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Giants.
The Cowboys suffered their fifth loss of the 2025 season to the Cardinals
in week nine at home last year, and now are looking to avoid the same amount of losses through week seven against the same opponent – one they haven’t beaten since 2017, even with three of the four meetings since that win in Arizona coming in Arlington.
If not for that 28-17 Cowboys win in 2017, the Cardinals would actually have an active nine-game winning streak against the Cowboys coming into this weekend, with the last win before that one coming in 2006.
The 2-5 Cardinals opened their season with what felt like an upset win at the time at the Chargers, who remain winless. In week six, they went back to SoFi Stadium and scored a legitimate upset against a division rival, beating the Rams 18-16. This snapped a four-game losing streak to the Seahawks, 49ers, Giants, and Lions, but Mike LaFleur’s team also could not stack wins as they lost last Sunday at home to the Broncos.
Let’s get to our weekly look at what the Cowboys must do to finally get the monkey cardinal off their back and beat these pesky red birds, or what could throw the season back off the rails with another bad home loss.
The Dallas Cowboys will beat the Arizona Cardinals if…
…they set the edge on defense.
There was one thing the Cowboys still struggled to do for the majority of the Philadelphia Eagles game. While the offense got points early and kept the pressure on most of the night, and the defense avoided the backbreaking plays and penalties until that offense handed them a sizeable lead, and the kicking game swung the field position battle in Dallas’ favor, still, the defense had a hard time setting the edge.
If ever the stage was set for a game to help prove the Cowboys are different this year, Sunday afternoon is the ultimate “do-over” game, because the defense couldn’t set an edge at all against Jacoby Brissett and these Cardinals under Matt Eberflus in 2025.
A strong run game on the edge, missed tackles, and the dual-threat ability of Brissett also gave the Cowboys defense no chance to hold up in coverage, as Marvin Harrison Jr. and Trey McBride caught touchdowns – the latter making the score 24-7 in the third quarter.
Christian Parker’s Cowboys defense showed new looks in the middle of the field against the Eagles with Shemar James and Demarvion Overshown at linebacker. The personnel elsewhere in the secondary is also better than when these teams met last season when Markquese Bell, Juanyeh Thomas, and Kaiir Elam all started.
Now, the Cowboys have Joey Porter Jr., Malik Hooker, and Caleb Downs patrolling in the backend. Schematically, Dallas has the answers to taking away the middle of the field where McBride has been the catalyst for Arizona’s pass game. The tight end leads the Cardinals in targets in their last three games, was one away from doing so in the Giants loss, and still has double digit targets in every other game he wasn’t the team leader.
The Cowboys clogging up the middle of the field passing lanes can’t come at the cost of either edge contain against the run or pass rush. Brissett is a hard quarterback to bring to the ground, so much so that it feels like it’ll take timely blitzes to finish sacks in this game as opposed to counting on an edge rusher group that’s been poor at finishing for the Cowboys.
Any blitz opportunities stem from stopping the run, and the Cardinals had 116 rushing yards in their week one win and 120 to beat the Rams. They’ve only had one other game over 100 yards this season, again at the Giants.
First-round pick Jeremiyah Love has a strong chance at rejoining Arizona’s offense out of the backfield for this game, and is also a load to tackle on inside runs while having home run ability outside the tackle. Zonovan “Bam” Knight led the Cardinals in rushing yards over their last two games with Love out, while veteran Tyler Allgeier has been listed as the starter.
The Cowboys will be playing a more dangerous game against Brissett and this stable of running backs than they did against Tanner McKee, a hobbled Saquon Barkley, and Dameon Pierce last week. If they don’t maximize what Dak Prescott and the offense does in this game by getting stops, the losing streak against the Cardinals will be at risk of continuing. A third straight game with a defensive takeaway would be like a full size Twix bar in the Halloween basket. It all starts with setting a hard edge.
The Dallas Cowboys will lose to the Arizona Cardinals if…
…they aren’t a serious football team.
In the spirit of trick-or-treating this weekend, this game needs to be a treat for the Cowboys at home if they want to avoid fans saying they fell for yet another trick of high expectations. In one of the two Cardinals’ wins, they didn’t score a touchdown, just six field goals. Of their five losses, only one is close, 36-30 to the 49ers. They gave up 45 points to the Lions and 31 to the Seahawks. The one deceiving score in their schedule was the 36-24 loss at the Giants, where the Cardinals had a chance to win it late but threw a pick six, but the Cowboys also have their own claim to having a chance to beat the Giants in New Jersey.
The best teams in this league string together wins, something the Brian Schottenheimer Cowboys have had a ghoulishly hard time doing. If they miss out on this opportunity to do so at home against the Cardinals, they would need to beat the Colts in week nine and 49ers in week 10 to get back-to-back wins on November 8th and 15th. It was November 23rd when the Cowboys won a second straight game last season. This pattern is not sustainable, and the time is now for the Cowboys to put the losing streak to the Cardinals behind them and think about stacking wins.
After a gauntlet of defensive-minded head coaches in the first five weeks of the season, where the Cowboys went 2-3, they didn’t come out with intensity at the Packers and lost to the offensive-minded Matt LaFleur. They bounced back by beating Nick Sirianni’s Eagles last Monday, and now get another offense-first head coach in his first season, Mike LaFleur. There really are no excuses and nowhere to hide for the Cowboys this weekend, if they want the win in Philly to be remembered for something and to be taken seriously going into November.
