Noted Superfan Ridiculously Thinks Dallas Cowboys Have Under 50% Chance to Win NFC East
You know things aren’t going great for the Dallas Cowboys when noted fan and apologist Skip Bayless jumps off the bandwagon.
Fresh off Dallas’ Thanksgiving Day loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, many in the Cowboys’ circle are feeling down. It was a game that, on paper, the Cowboys should have easily won. It was also a game they needed to win, because now after the loss, Dallas has lost two in a row and three out of its last four.
The Cowboys are indeed in a bad place, but are things bad enough that Dallas may not even win the NFC East?
Bayless, somehow, thinks that’s possible.
Skip Bayless thinks the Dallas Cowboys have a 49% chance to win the NFC East
As it has been many times in the past, the NFC East has been putrid this season. The Cowboys, even despite their struggles this month, are the only team with a winning record. The Philadelphia Eagles are second in the division with a 5-6 record, but they’ve at least won two-straight games. The Washington Football Team is 4-6, and the New York Giants are 3-7. Outside of Dallas, there isn’t a playoff team in the bunch. That is unless you’re willing to put your faith in first-year head coach Nick Sirianni and quarterback Jalen Hurts in Philly, but that seems like a stretch.
Dallas basically has the division locked up at this point, but Bayless doesn’t see it that way. He’s obviously reeling from Dallas’ terrible month, and that’s impacting his view of the team, swaying everything negative.
As Bayless sees it, he’s just reading the situation in front of him.
“I’m being realistic. I’m a completely, harshly, objective Dallas Cowboys for life fan, and I’m going to give my team a 49% chance [to win the NFC East],” he said. “I’m trying to see the glass as half full, but the glass is broken. That’s what’s happened right now.”
“What do I have? I go on evidence. I go on the eye test,” he went on to say. “I say what I see, and I just saw through the month of November, my team stink it up against three AFC West teams.”
Dallas has bad and the Thanksgiving loss was a low point
The Cowboys are riding a skid in the wrong direction, and they seem helpless to turn it around. If there were ever a game to show up in, it would have been the Thanksgiving contest. Not only was the whole country watching, but the Raiders were an extremely beatable opponent. They had lost three in a row themselves and are in the midsts of one of the more tumultuous seasons of recent memory.
Dallas couldn’t take advantage of a mediocre team at home, though.
“Unfortunately, you saw a bad football team,” Bayless said of the Cowboys. “You saw poorly coached and poorly motivated. Not ready to play at kickoff on the biggest stage outside of the Super Bowl in the sport. That game will be the second biggest TV audience of the year next to the Super Bowl. Don’t the players know you’ve got to come ready?”
Yes, the Cowboys were flagged a lot, and they had their thoughts on that after the game, but so were the Raiders. At the end of the day, blaming the loss on the referees just won’t cut it for Dallas.
Officiating aside, the Cowboys still gave up 36 points to Las Vegas, which is the most amount of points the Raiders have scored this season. The Cowboys allowed Derek Carr to throw for 373 yards and a score. Dallas gave up 143 total yards on the ground to the Raiders, including 87 yards and a score from Josh Jacobs.
For as problematic as Dallas’ offense has been as of late, it was the vaunted Cowboys’ defense that actually disappointed on Thanksgiving.
“I’ve got two defensive players of the year candidates on my defense that gave up 506 yards and 36 points. It doesn’t compute,” Bayless said. “It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t translate into, ‘Oh, yeah, they can bounce back; they’re really good.'”
For as bad as Dallas has been, Bayless’ over reactionary take is worse
It would be one thing to say that Dallas no longer looks like a Super Bowl favorite because that’s 100% a realistic take after the Cowboys’ last few games. To say that the Cowboys have a less than 50% chance to win the NFC East, though? That’s just over reactionary, and frankly, it’s a terrible take.
No, Dallas hasn’t looked good, and in a more robust division, that would be very problematic. The NFC East isn’t a great division, though. So much so that even a struggling Dallas team can still run away with it.
The current struggles don’t take away from the base of talent the Cowboys have. Their ceiling may no longer be Super Bowl favorite, but that doesn’t mean the bottom has dropped out, and the Cowboys are all of a sudden in jeopardy of tanking the last part of the season. Perhaps instead of viewing the Cowboys as viable in the race for the top team in the NFC, maybe it makes more sense to lower the expectations and simply focus on closing out the division.
That’s something the Cowboys can do.
Four out of the last six games on Dallas’ schedule are against the NFC East. They play the Eagles and Giants once each and Washington twice. The combined record of the rest of the division is 12-19. To say that Dallas can’t lock that up is lunacy.
Still, Bayless clearly has lost faith in his team. He’s not sure they can win the NFC East, and that’s because he’s not sure the Cowboys know who they are.
“If you did what you did yesterday and you blow chance after chance after chance to beat a team that you’re much better than, all of a sudden you wake up this morning and you say, ‘I don’t know what we are,’ because I don’t think they know who they are.”
Stats courtesy of ESPN and Pro Football Reference.
