4 reasons an Eagles win over the Cowboys will be extra sweet in Week 17

It’s both Dallas Week and Kelly Green week for the Philadelphia Eagles, but it feels like all of the juice for this game is manufactured and inauthentic. The NFL saw this coming and flexed the game to the early slate on Sunday, and now it’s looking like Jalen Hurts is going to be in concussion protocol and we’ll have to watch Kenny Pickett as the Eagles quarterback for another week.

The Eagles are going to the playoffs and the Cowboys season is done. They’ll play for some semblance of pride and then go back to the locker room to find January tee times... But, there are a handful of things in this game to look forward to, you just have to dig a little to get there.

There’s still juice in a lackluster Eagles-Cowboys game

There are only 120 minutes left of regular season football for the Eagles, and all of them are against teams in the division. The first 60 is against the Cowboys. They’re an unlikable franchise with a fanbase that lives purely on nostalgia and unwarranted cockiness. Thinking about all of them having a bad day will give you goosebumps.

Micah Parsons will be sad

Up until about a week ago, there was a decent amount of evidence that Micah Parson wanted to be a Philadelphia Eagle. He’s from Harrisburg, he went to Penn State, he throws hissy fits about how good Howie Roseman drafts and does free agency, and he’s friends with Darius Slay.

Now, it’d be bad if Micah came to the Eagles because recent history tells us that ex-Cowboys who come to Philadelphia almost never end up working out (DeMarco Murray, Miles Austin, Orlando Scandrick).

Last week, he had some choice words about The Birds when he was asked about whether or not he was rooting for the Eagles to beat the Commanders, even though an Eagles loss meant the Cowboys were eliminated from playoff contention. 

Then, on Thursday Micah spoke with the media about this game and said, “...They are fighting for where they wanna be in the playoffs. We’re just fighting to whoop ‘em. They got more to lose than we do so that’d be a great feeling right there.”

It’s much easier to dislike a Micah Parsons who doesn’t like the Eagles than it is to dislike a Micah Parsons who likes the Eagles. If Micah wants the smoke, then give him the smoke. It’ll be fun when the camera cuts to his face in the fourth quarter and you can see that he’s trying to figure out if he’s mad, sad, disappointed, or dumbfounded.

There won’t be any ‘Jalen Hurts beat Cooper Rush, so who cares?’ stuff

The Eagles and Cowboys have one of the best rivalries in all of the NFL, but lately (the last five years), there’s only been a handful of games where both quarterbacks are healthy and their late-season game actually means something. This game will have neither.

These are the matchups that we've seen since 2020:

2020: Wentz/DiNucci, Hurts/Dalton
2021: Hurts/Prescott, Minshew/Prescott
2022: Hurts/Rush, Minshew/Prescott
2023: Hurts/Prescott, Hurts/Prescott
2024: Hurts/Rush, Pickett(?)/Rush

That’s three out of the last nine games played without the two starting quarterbacks. That stinks because it’s not the best football, making it incredibly difficult to insult the other team. Like, how great would it have been to tell Cowboys fans, ‘You lost to an abysmal 2020 Eagles? Your team is bad, and you, by association, are also bad.’ Unfortunately, the Cowboys team they beat was led by former XFL Seattle Sea Dragon, Ben DiNucci. That’s lame, you can’t brag after beating backups. 

Luckily, this game is on relatively even ground because both teams will probably use backup quarterbacks. That’s about as competitive as you can make this game. Hell, we might be (and hopefully get to) see some third-string quarterbacks going blow-for-blow in this game. That’d be fun. The world isn’t ready for a Tanner McKee and Trey Lance rivalry.

Ground the Cooper Rush talk, Again.

Dak Prescott hurt his hamstring in the Cowboy’s Week 9 game against Atlanta, so when the Eagles went down to Dallas in Week 10, it was Cooper Rush’s first start since his five-game stretch in 2022. 

Going into that game, the talk about Cooper was that he had a 4-1 record as a starter. The part that wasn’t talked about is that the defense held teams to 16 or fewer points in each of those wins and that the one loss was to the Eagles. 

Then Cooper made his first start this season in Week 10 and the Eagles defense absolutely shut him down; He was 13-of-23 for 43 yards. 

In the six games since then, he’s led the team to a 4-2 record, and once again, there’s rumbling of ‘Cooper Rush might be good’ conversations. To be fair, he’s won higher-scoring games this season, but his defense has been getting more takeaways to help them out. 13 of the Cowboys' 21 total takeaways have come in Week 11 through 16. The Cowboys have scored 34 points off of those 13 takeaways. That’s not nothing. 

An Eagles win in Week 17 would, more than likely, send Cooper Rush and the people who like him back down to Earth. That should make the 2025 Cowboys have to reconsider yet another position. I’m using ‘should’ because nothing Jerry Jones does makes any sense and he’ll probably be fine sticking with the off-brand Carson Wentz.

A no-nonsense Week 18

The Eagles either need to win one of their last two games or have the Commanders lose one of their last two games to win the NFC East. If they do that, they’ll be locked in as the second seed in the NFC at a minimum.

After that, it would just come down to what happens between the Vikings and the Lions. In Week 17, Minnesota is playing at home against the Green Bay Packers and Detroit is playing at the San Francisco 49ers. In Week 18, the Vikings and the Lions are playing each other in Detroit.

If the Eagles win and both of those teams lose in Week 17, the NFL will almost definitely have the Eagles play in an earlier slot than the Lions and Vikings game in Week 18. That means the Eagles play their starters against the Giants in Week 18, and pull them once the game gets out of hand. 

If the Eagles win and either of those teams wins in Week 17, the Eagles don’t have to play their starters at all in Week 18. If Jalen Hurts is cleared from the concussion protocol by then, there’s a strong argument that he and the starting offense should be in for the first drive, but nothing more than that. 

It’s pretty straightforward at this point: If the Eagles can’t get a bye week in the playoffs, make Week 18 as much of a bye week for as many players as possible, and if the Eagles can bet a bye week in the playoffs, beat the hell out of the Giants.