Things look bleak for the Cowboys right now. They lost consecutive games for the first time this season and then went off to their bye. They’ve had to sit with that feeling for a full week now, and on top
of it they’ve watched the Eagles rip off their third straight win. According to the prediction model from The Athletic, Dallas has just a 7% chance of making the postseason right now.
But there is still hope.
The road from here is pretty challenging. Monday night’s game against a struggling Raiders team is the easier battle, but after that they face the Eagles, Chiefs, and Lions over the course of just 12 days. After their mini-bye following that gauntlet, they’re “rewarded” with home games against the Vikings and Chargers before finishing off with two divisional contests.
Odds won’t be great for the Cowboys in any of those games. They’re favored over the Raiders, as a visitor, but that may be the last time the odds will favor them until they go to New Jersey in Week 18. Perhaps they’ll be favorites over the Commanders the week before, depending on the long-term prognosis of injured quarterback Jayden Daniels, but that’s probably it.
So how can there possibly be any hope of a playoff run when the schedule is so stacked against them? One must only look inward, to when the Cowboys pulled off something similar just seven years ago.
I’m talking, of course, about the 2018 season. Where the team is at in 2025 has almost perfectly mirrored where they were at in 2018 at this point. The 2018 Cowboys were caught in a vicious cycle of winning and then losing, starting the season off 3-4 before losing to the Titans to give them their first consecutive losses on the year. They even came close to a tie, falling to the Texans in overtime in Week 5.
Something changed at 3-5, though. The Cowboys came out on the road against the Eagles (who, just like in 2025, were reigning Super Bowl champions) and won. They then went to Atlanta and pulled out a victory. Suddenly, they started playing with confidence. A Thanksgiving win over Washington led straight into a home game with the Saints, who had not lost since the season opener.
The Cowboys won, making them one of just three teams that year to beat the Saints; the third team to beat them did so in Week 17, when New Orleans rested their starters.
Following the morale boost of upsetting the Saints, an overtime win over the Eagles followed. Suddenly, they’d ripped off five straight, with three of them being divisional games and all of them being conference games. A shutout on the road against the Colts – whose elite defense was run by none other than Matt Eberflus – was a brief setback, but it being an AFC opponent did little to affect the Cowboys’ playoff push.
Wins over the Buccaneers and Giants solidified things: the Cowboys won the NFC East and clinched a spot in the playoffs. They wound up beating the Seahawks – whose offensive coordinator was one Brian Schottenheimer – in the Wild Card round before falling by one score to a Rams team that went all the way to the Super Bowl.
It was truly a miraculous turnaround. In their seven wins to finish out the regular season, Dallas was an underdog in five of them. Of the two games they were favored, one was at home against the Eagles by just a field goal; in other words, a draw on a neutral playing site. That underscores just how unlikely the run was for the Cowboys.
What was the catalyst for said turnaround? Funny you should ask that, because Zack Martin literally just spoke about that.
Martin details how the team had moved on from star Dez Bryant before the season, and how the offense had been struggling to adjust to his absence:
“We were kind of limping through the season a little bit. I think we were about .500 at the midway point. And we brought [Amari Cooper] in and… kind of just hit the ground running. That was the turning point of our entire season, we ended up winning our last, like, five or six games and made the playoffs.”
It’s not hard to draw more parallels here. The Cowboys moved on from another star, Micah Parsons, right before this season began and the defense has been limping through the season as a result. Just as with the Cowboys offense in 2018, there were moments where things looked okay, but everyone knew they were missing the player the front office foolishly moved on from.
So, just like 2018, the Cowboys have now made a move at the trade deadline. Not one but two trades, actually. The headline was Jets star Quinnen Williams, but Bengals linebacker Logan Wilson was a sneaky good pickup as well.
Williams has been one of the most dominant defensive tackles in the league these last few years, both as a run stuffer and pass rusher. He now reunites with Aaron Whitecotton, the Cowboys defensive line coach who was with the Jets when Williams reached All Pro status.
Wilson, meanwhile, led the Bengals in tackles each year from 2021 to 2023 before finishing second last season. A team captain in Cincinnati, Wilson fell out of favor with the new defensive coordinator this season, leading to his trade request. But he’s a leader in the locker room who’s been a tackle machine throughout his career.
With Williams on the defensive line, alongside Osa Odighizuwa and Kenny Clark, and Wilson joining a linebacker corps that’s expected to get DeMarvion Overshown back soon, the Cowboys have made significant upgrades on defense. Neither plays a position as high profile as Cooper did, but the Cowboys have shifted the vibe in the locker room by adding these two.
Sitting at nearly the same exact point they were in 2018, the Cowboys have quietly positioned themselves for a similar type of run. Obviously it’s a big ask to gamble on something as improbable as that happening again, but the Cowboys know for a fact it can happen because they’ve already done it before.
