Hard Knocks highlights: Cowboys, Eagles share spotlight in NFC East debut

It kind of snuck up on us, but the In-Season Hard Knocks premiered on Tuesday night. This season, it’s covering the NFC East. It’s a division that is absolutely loaded with content: The Eagles are choking, the Cowboys are trying to come back from being dead, the Commanders are detoxing from their 2024 bender, and the Giants exist. 

Because it’s four teams, we don’t get the super deep level of coverage that we do in the Training Camp version of the show, but it’s still pretty cool.

The first episode gave us answers to questions we had, answers to questions we didn’t have, and also gave us questions without answers. It was a lot to suss out in an hour-long show, but here’s what happened for each team:

Philadelphia Eagles (8-4)

Learned: Jalen Hurts talks to people.

One of the biggest takeaways for the whole episode is about what happened on the play from last weekend, where Jalen Hurts missed DeVonta Smith. It turns out, Hurts thought Smitty was going to stop on his route, but instead, he ran a slant. 

It turns out that Jalen Hurts isn’t a cross-eyed, rat-brained, illiterate moron that everyone on Twitter wanted you to think he is; it was just a miscommunication. Who would’ve thought? (Answer: everyone with a brain)

Every single time a broadcast shows Jalen Hurts on the sideline, it’s just him sitting on a bench with no one around. It really makes it seem like he’s a reclusive cat with the approachability of a pitcher in the midst of a perfect game… That’s wrong. He’s out there talking to his guys and being accountable for the plays that he messes up. Don’t get it twisted.

Need answered: Where is Kevin Patullo?

The only time we heard Kevin Patullo talk was in two very brief clips: one was in a meeting room, and the other was after an A.J. Brown touchdown. In the latter, he was saying something along the lines of, ‘See, I told you so.’

We all know that the Eagles’ offense is based purely on the players' talents and nothing about scheme, play calling, or play sequencing. Quite frankly, it’s stolen valor for this turd to throw out something like, ‘You have to trust me.' He’s not doing, adding, or coordinating a single thing to this team. 

Just a reminder, Hard Knocks lets each team have the final cut. If the Eagles wanted to add something to let their OC look better, they could’ve. The only thing they kept in about Patullo was him being a rah-rah guy and him taking partial credit for an amazing play by A.J. Brown. 

Learned: Nick Sirianni’s office has everything you’ve ever wanted

Hard Knocks showed us how Nick Sirianni does his production meetings with the guys who call the games. In this episode, Sirianni was sunk into a couch with an iPad on his lap. During that conversation, it showed a whole bunch of different shots around Sirianni’s office. 

We saw a whole bunch of massive pictures from the 2024 season: Saquon Barkley getting held up by the offensive line after he rushed for 2,000 yards, everyone touching the Lombardi trophy, everyone on stage after the NFC Championship game in 2022, him at a press conference after the Super Bowl, Saquon Barkley in the end zone during the NFC Championship game in 2024… it was all of the coolest pictures and it’ll make anyone want to spend disgusting amounts of money redecorating an office.

Need answered: Do they not get it?

A big theme of the Eagles sections of the show is that they’re almost relishing in the fact that everyone outside of the team is panicking right now. “The sky is falling outside the locker room” is a phrase that was said a handful of times, but they almost said it in jest.

Yeah, dude, the sky is falling. Are you guys not getting what's happening? The offense is terrible, and now it’s affecting the defense. 

You guys are getting three-and-outs at a disgusting rate, and it’s causing the defense to break. You guys had two games in five days, and in the second game, the defense was on the field for 85 plays. 

For the first three quarters of that game, they were really good. Then the dam broke, and everything went to hell.

It makes sense that their message is to stay calm… but on a human level, that’s wildly unrealistic. Someone’s got to say, ‘Hey guys, what we’re doing right now is terrible. On Friday, we spent three hours getting booed. Maybe we should be a little urgent about all of this so we don’t make everyone hate us.’

It’s crazy to be dismissive about it. The season is going to hell because the offense can’t do anything, and they’re trying to do some Chicken Little type of thing. 

Dallas Cowboys (6-5-1)

Learned: Brian Schottenheimer has a personality

Did anyone go into Hard Knocks thinking that Brian Schottenheimer was going to be a character of intrigue? Probably not. The guy’s got a little bit of juice. 

He’s rallying his dudes and making sure they’re ready to go for important games… which is pretty much every single one of them for Dallas. But still, it’s impressive.

Now, on the other side of that coin, the show gave us his postgame speech after the Eagles game in Week 12. He’s absolutely ripping off Pete Carroll’s whole, ‘You can’t win after the first quarter, you can't win after the second quarter, you can't win after the third quarter, you can win after the fourth quarter,' speech.

Other than his blatant plagiarism, he seems like a likable guy. That’s the first time since 2006 (with Bill Parcells) that they’ve had an energetic and charismatic coach. In that time, they’ve gone through the know-it-all Wade Phillips, the clapping Jason Garrett, and the pile of mud that was Mike McCarthy. 

The bar is low, but Schottenheimer seems like he’s punching the right buttons for once.

Need answered: Does CeeDee Lamb get everything delivered on a silver platter?

There was a brief part of the show where we saw CeeDee Lamb walking into Jerryworld on Thanksgiving. There was a guy in a parking lot with a covered silver platter. Lamb took the lid off, and his game cleats were sitting on it. 

I’ll never admit that anything CeeDee Lamb is cool… but if there were a time to break that rule, it’d be when the dude opens up a silver platter to reveal shoes. 

This seems like one of those things where if you do it just once, you get addicted to it. If I were CeeDee Lamb, I’d get every article of clothing I own delivered to me on a silver platter… and then I’d become a diva, complain that George Pickens is getting too many targets, and then ask for a trade in the offseason.

Washington Commanders (3-9)

Learned: Dan Quinn lives by backwards hats

There was a very brief part of this episode where Dan Quinn is driving and talking to a camera. In that shot, he’s wearing a backwards hat while he’s driving. Everybody knew that he was a backwards hat guy, but doing it while driving is a real and psychotic dedication to the game. 

First off, it’s an incredibly vibey move, but also it’ll make an entire car ride super uncomfortable. The next time you're driving, put your hand between the back of your head and the headrest to see how much room is actually there.

Spoiler: it’s a whole lot less room than you’d think. Driving with the backwards hat makes you shift your entire posture forward and makes the entire car ride just kind of uncomfortable. 

Maybe he’s doing it to build grit or something like that. It’s weird.

Need answered: Who does Dan Quinn think he is?

The show gave us a look into the Commanders' locker room after their loss on Sunday Night Football. We heard Quinn say, “We lost, but we’re not lost anymore. You know what I’m saying by that? Sometimes you get your heart broken, but you’ve got to lay it all out there.“

What the hell? Sure, the Commanders came close to winning that game, but they’re essentially eliminated from playoff contention now. If anything, they’re even more lost.

Also, they have a super old roster. 36-year-old Von Miller probably doesn’t really care about Quinn’s perceived identity of the team when they have a 3-9 record… especially when it was Quinn who kept Jayden Daniels on the field during a blowout loss, which directly led to his dislocated elbow. 

That sounds like the lyrics to an Alanis Morissette song, not something a coach says to a team after they got smacked in the face during a prime time game. 

New York Giants (2-11)

Learned: Jaxson Dart might be perpetually concussed

It seems like the Giants should probably just deny every request that they get to be on Hard Knocks. In 2024’s offseason, they were on Hard Knocks, and we all got to see Joe Schoen botch the Saquon Barkley free agent stuff. It made them look really dumb.

We only got a little bit of the Giants in this episode, and wouldn’t you know it? It made them look dumb again. It’s just that this time, it was Jaxson Dart who looked like the ding-dong. 

At one point, he said, “Where does the wind come from, yo? There’s like no canyons. There’s like nothing it’s coming through.”

Now, to be fair, that’s a good question. I don’t actually know where the wind comes from… but I do know that it has nothing to do with canyons; that should not be your first thought about the origins of wind. His mind is going to be blown when he hears about how many tornadoes happen in the Midwest, even though there are no canyons. 

Later on, he was talking to a coach about which way the ocean was, and he ended the discussion with, “I have no idea where I’m at.”

All of this leads me to a theory: Jaxson Dart might just have a permanent concussion. 

It’d make a lot of sense, and it’d explain all of the times that he’s gone into concussion protocol without actually having a concussion. Especially that time during the Week 6 game on Thursday Night Football when he went into the blue tent to get checked, but he was in there for a super long time. 

That was just the concussion checker being stumped about whether Dart’s brain was scrambled from a hit, or if he genuinely didn’t know what day it was. 

Learned: Mike Kafka needs better friends

We already know pretty much everything we need to know about the Giants; however, Mike Kafka is relatively enigmatic. Luckily for us (unluckily for him), he got a decent amount of face time on the episode.

If he knew he was getting that amount of screen time, he should’ve asked a friend, ‘Hey, how do I look?’ 

If that was a good friend, they would’ve said, ‘You look sharp. But let me grab some scissors really quick and trim your eyebrow for you. You have an incredibly long and distracting hair.’