6 things we learned from Cowboys-Eagles and about the NFC East this season

It’s tough to have realistic takeaways from a Week 1 game. It’s even tougher to have realistic takeaways from a Week 1 game when one of the most impactful defensive tackles in the NFL gets ejected from the game before he even takes a snap. It’s even, even tougher to have realistic takeaways when there is an hour-long rain delay in the third quarter that kills the momentum of the only turnover in the game…

But the Philadelphia Eagles did beat the Dallas Cowboys 24-20 in the first (and hopefully longest) game of the 2025 season, and there were some pretty important things that we saw. Some things you have to dig for, and some are pretty superficial.

Chaos, followed by chaos, followed by lightning, followed by chaos

For the most part, that’s not the Eagles’ defense that we’re going to see this year because Jalen Carter will end up playing over 80% of the defensive snaps rather than exactly zero. 

On the other side of that coin, the Cowboys aren’t going to line up against a guy like Jalen Carter every single week, so that defensive line is probably closer to what they’re going to see all season.

Also, most of the time, CeeDee Lamb doesn’t drop four of the last five balls that come his way. That’s September football, though. Weird things happen. You just have to figure out what’s weird and what’s real. This is (probably) the real stuff.

Deplorable Dak Prescott

Listen, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Jalen Carter was in the right for spitting on Dak Prescott… BUT in an attempt to rationalize the thoughts of a psychopath… I get it. 

Dak has been the quarterback of the Cowboys since 2016, which means that he’s going into his 10th year, and that also means he’s the longest-tenured quarterback with his team in the NFL. Three-quarters of the NFC East have had a personal disdain for him for the greater part of a decade. 

This guy won the Walter Payton Man of the Year in 2022, then got booed when he received the award at the Super Bowl. So on a human level, it makes sense that he has some hate in his heart. That is entirely understandable.

So this game started with Ben VanSumeren jacking up his knee, and then Jalen Carter getting kicked out of the game for flagrantly spitting on Prescott. It took THREE HOURS for the NFL to release the footage of Prescott instigating the entire thing by clearly spitting towards Carter. 

Dak ended up saying that it wasn’t intended to be aggressive toward Carter and that he just likes to spit ... Which, okay ... That’s a weird thing to say, and no one believes you, but whatever. Keep that lie going, hoss. 

It’s the smugness of his face in that video. The nod. The smile. Hell, you can hear the douchbaggery of his laugh in your head. It’s that he knows that he got someone to break. It’s awful. 

That’s the face of every Twitter troll ever. That’s the face of a guy who posts Derrick Henry’s efficiency stats from 2024 and said that he had a better season than Saquon Barkley. That’s the face of the person who says Jalen Hurts is a running back. That’s the face of someone who uses only pressure rate to argue that Trey Hendrickson is better than Myles Garrett. 

2025 is the year that Dak Prescott turns heel, and he’s relishing in it. He’s just the worst. 

The Eagles’ CB2 situation is pretty terrible

This was the first time we’ve seen a completely Darius Slay-less Eagles’ defense in five years, and boy, did they miss him. The Week 1 cornerback opposite Quinyon Mitchell was Adoree’ Jackson. Turns out, that’s not going to work. 

If it felt like he was getting hammered with targets, that’s because he was. He played 38 snaps, he was targeted on seven, and he allowed five catches for 103 yards (per Next Gen Stats). It was terrible. 

The dude gave himself a C after the game … I don’t know what kind of grading scale he’s using, but if that was a C, lord have mercy on our souls if we ever see a D or an F. 

At one point, he came off the field and went into the medical tent, which meant Jakorian Bennett got a handful of snaps. Dak immediately threw at him, and Bennett got called for a defensive pass interference. Yeah, that’s not good, but at least he was close enough to the receiver to actually get a DPI. It feels like it’s just a matter of time until he actually gets the starting spot. 

The Eagles go to Kansas City in Week 2, and if Adoree’ Jackson gets the start, Patrick Mahomes is going to put him through some Ramsay Bolton-esque torture; the flaying, the mental stuff, the other stuff… all of it. 

The Cowboys’ defense might be okay

A week before this game started, the Cowboys traded Micah Parsons, and then Jerry Jones did a press conference where he said they were terrible at stopping the run. The vibes for that unit were low.

They started very shaky. In the first half, they had no answers to anything that the Eagles were throwing at them. That changed in the second half. Sure, there was an hour-long rain delay, and after that, neither offense was really able to move the ball, but they did adjust. They blitzed, they shut down the run, and they stopped the Eagles’ attempts to kill the clock. 

On top of that, Trevon Diggs looked pretty solid. He had an ACL last December, and at the beginning of the week, it wasn’t a sure thing that he was going to be playing in this game. He played, and he didn’t look like a liability. When you’re coming off an ACL, that’s not always a sure thing. 

By the end of the game, the Cowboys’ defense was doing its job better than the offense was. That’s probably not what you want if you’re a Cowboys fan, but it’s got to give you a little bit of confidence that it’s not a hopeless unit. 

However… buddy, that team is missing Parsons. There were a handful of plays where Jalen Hurts had all kinds of time, and you have to imagine that one of the best pass rushers in the world would’ve really helped. 

Jordan Davis, football player

For the last two or three offseasons, one big story has been Jordan Davis losing weight. Everyone thinks, ‘Alright, now he’s going to be able to play on more third downs,’ and then it ends up not really happening. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have the best conditioning, maybe it’s not.

When he came to training camp this year, he looked especially svelte. We’ve seen him lighter and more in shape before, but not like this. Regardless, it was a ‘fool me twice’ kind of thing.

Buddy… this time it might be the real deal. With Jalen Carter going down before the game really started, Davis got the full workload. He played 50 snaps, which was 89.3% of the snaps. 

For context, in all of 2022, he played 216 snaps (26.2%). In all of 2023, it was 498 (45.1%). In all of 2024, it was 376 (37.6%). In one game, he played 13 percent of the snaps that he played all last season. That’s awesome. 

Now, the question is about how he will recover from that. If you remember back in Week 12 of the 2023 season, he played 60 snaps against the Bills, and on his last play, he chased Josh Allen out of bounds. After that, he was a relative no-show. 

Luckily, the Eagles have 10 days off before they play the Chiefs on Sunday, September 14th. You have to think he’ll have time to get right by then.

Jayden Daniels is going to crush in Week 7

We’ve seen Jalen Hurts be a good scrambler, but we’ve also seen him chunk the ball out of bounds whenever a receiver isn’t open. For a lot of the 2024 regular season, it was the latter. 

Those throwaways are boring. Those scrambles? Those are electric. A 15-yard scramble on a third and five? Four yards for a touchdown? Eight yards and a dive at the pylon? Get out of town. That’s the Hurts that wins games.

If you think of five of the Eagles' offensive plays that changed this game, three of them were quarterback scrambles. The Cowboys were very, very sloppy and undisciplined when it came to containing Hurts.

The Cowboys play the Commanders for the first time in Week 7. Sure, a lot can change between now and then, but Jayden Daniels is going to run a whole lot more than Hurts did. It’s hard to watch the Cowboys’ defense and think, ‘Yeah, they’ll be able to handle one of the shiftiest quarterbacks in the league who runs more than anyone else.’

The Giants are definitely the worst team in the division

Going into this game, the Cowboys were a team with an okay ceiling and a floor in hell. If they reached that floor and everyone who tweeted, ‘Tank for Arch’ after the Parsons trade was right, the Cowboys would be the worst team in this division.

It looks like that floor might not be that low. Everything here: Javonte Williams looking good and healthy, Matt Eberflus’s adjustments working, Dak being despicable but accurate… It seems like the Cowboys are setting themselves up to finish with a 9-8 record and not finish last in the division.

So good for them; good for the Cowboys for making sure the Giants stay at the bottom of the barrel. It would’ve been a real shame…a reeeeeaaaaaal shame if the Giants and their bizarrely good defense and predictably terrible offense were the third best team in the division and didn’t get a top-five pick in the draft. It would’ve been a real shame. 

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