Cowboys Top 10 Reasons They’ll Win 10 Games
FRISCO - We have the NFL schedule and now we need a drumroll, please, for ... "The Dallas Cowboys Top 10 Reasons They’ll Win 10 Games.'' ...
No. 10 - The opener "at the Rams'' is a home game.
"I had my fingers crossed we’d get a chance to open that stadium,'' Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says. "In the entertainment capital of the world, in that iconic stadium, your Dallas Cowboys are coming out there to show up on center stage. It feels like the Dallas Cowboys.”
It's cheating, really. Southern California is Cowboys Country and the SoFi Stadium opening game isn't "against the Cowboys.'' It's "for the Cowboys.''
Wanna buy a Rams ticket into the new building? As our pal Kristi Scales notes, that can cost you, oh, $75. Unless you want to buy the Cowboys-Rams game.
That same ticket will cost you $290.
No. 9 - If you gotta do Niners and Eagles back to back? Do 'em like this. At home. In December, after your new program has (hopefully) kicked into gear.
No. 8 - There is a certain cushiness to the AFC North. And there is a certain cushiness to the NFC East. And the Cowboys get all of that cush. And just in case the AFC North somehow looks a little foreign to Dallas? Ask new Cowboys backup QB Andy Dalton for assistance. He knows his way around the cush.
No. 7 - It's well-known that the Cowboys have one of the four softest schedules in 2020 based on opponents' collective records in 2019. That's fairly helpful.
No. 6 - Less well-known: How soft 2020 is based in sportsbook projections. In that department - oddsmakers predicting Dallas opponents' records in the upcoming year? That's top-five softie for the Cowboys.
No. 5 - "Regression to the mean.'' Certain extreme numbers, one way or the other, can be expected to generally pendulum their way back to the middle. Dallas' odd swing a year ago? As Evan Silva points out, the 2019 Cowboys went 1-6 in one-score games.
That's not "normal.'' A decent team should have a decent record in that category. (A well-coached team should be even better than "decent.'') Let the pendulum swing back just a little bit and an 8-8 Dallas team wins 10.
No. 4 - Feasting on the Redskins on Thanksgiving. The Cowboys beat the Redskins on Thanksgiving in their last two tries, in 2016 and 2018. Well, yeah, but Dallas always has a winning edge on Turkey Day at AT&T Stadium, right?
Wrong.
The Cowboys have inexplicably lost their other four Thanksgiving games since 2014. Most recently they tryptophan'ed their way to a 2019 embarrassment against the Bills.
No, the Cowboys aren't great on Thanksgiving anymore. Unless they play Washington on Thanksgiving. Which in 2020 they do.
No. 3 - Too often in the Jason Garrett era, the Cowboys' gameplan seemed design to win low-scoring games. Meetings against "track-meet offenses'' posed a problem.
In 2020? First off, Dallas has only four "track-meet'' foes: The Rams, Falcons, Cardinals and Ravens. Think about those four; they are trying to hang half-a-hundred on you.
New coach Mike McCarthy has openly talked about how nice it might be to not have to score "35 points'' to win. But I take his comments another way, in a way that is willing to explore an ability to score 35 points to win.
There is every reason to believe that this 2020 Dallas offense can do just that, at least on occasion.
No. 2 - The "important games'' are later. From McCarthy: ‘I really like the way the schedule lays out. It’s kind of nice not to have a division game until we can get started and find out where we are as a football team.”
That's not to say September is automatically less important than January. But divisional games almost "count double.'' If the newly-installed system here stumbles a bit, let it stumble against non-division foes ... and that's all Dallas plays for the first four weeks of the season.
The schedule buys time for the system.
And the No. 1 reason the Cowboys can win 10 in 2020? Jason Garrett is gone. I don't mean that to sound as snarky as it seems. Maybe it means McCarthy is a better coach than Garrett; if so, maybe he's worth a half-game. Or a game. Or two, who knows?
But it was surely time for a change, time for a reinvigoration, and everybody in the building, and in the locker room, knew it. "Change for the sake of change'' isn't always wise. But it was wise here.
