NFC East News: Help at the edge, quarterback woes, a running game, and faux-safety

It was a big weekend in the NFC East. The Washington Commanders got their hearts ripped out on Thursday, it took the Dallas Cowboys every possible second to beat the New York Giants on Sunday afternoon, and then the Philadelphia Eagles ended the Chiefs’ winning aura on Sunday afternoon. 

Before we move on to Week 3, there are some things to clean up and some news stories to look at from over the weekend. We’ll look at this in the order of division standings: Eagles, Commanders, Cowboys, and then the Giants. 

Eagles: Za’Darius Smith’s big day out

In ESPN’s weekly piece about the biggest questions and surprise performances from Week 2, Tim McManus wrote, “Most surprising performance: Newly acquired edge rusher Za'Darius Smith made the most of his limited role, posting four tackles, three stuffs and half a sack. Smith, an 11-year veteran, signed with Philadelphia last week and immediately helped a group that was held without a sack against the Cowboys.”

He’s 100 percent right about that. In Week 1, the Eagles' pass rush wasn’t super productive. They were one of the three teams that week not to have a single sack, and on top of that, they only had 12 pressures, eight of which came in the last 20 minutes of the game (after the lightning delay).

The next day, the Eagles signed the mega-veteran defensive end, Za’Darius Smith. Typically, you’d think that a guy who gets one week to learn a Fangio scheme would have limited snaps, and he wouldn’t be super effective… you’d think wrong. 

It’s the dude’s 11th season in the NFL, and he’s on his eighth defensive coordinator. He’s learned a whole lot of different systems. As for the Fangio connection, it’s very loose: Joe Barry was the Packers’ defensive coordinator while Smith was there in 2021. Joe Barry ran an incredibly bastardized version of the Fangio scheme… the hitch there is that he only played 18 snaps all season before he had back surgery and missed the whole season.

If you're wondering why he popped so quickly, it’s probably less about his familiarity with the system and more about him being a good football player who’s had a whole lot of experience.

He ended up playing 19 plays and was solid on almost all of them. In addition to his tackles, stuffs, TFL, QB hit, and half a sack, he was setting an edge and forcing runs inside and taking away passing lanes. It was a great debut, and again, he did it with minimal preparation.

Now, the key here is his recovery. The guy got off his couch and played a game nine days later. Having one good game is cool, but being 33 years old and having back-to-back good games is sick. 

Commanders: At least it's not Turf Toe

Monday was a bloodbath for quarterbacks. We learned that Joe Burrow is going to miss at least three months with Turf Toe, J.J. McCarthy is out for a while with some kind of ankle thing, Justin Fields got hummus-brained, and Jayden Daniels is day-to-day with a knee sprain.

Of those four injuries, the worst vibes are around Jayden Daniels. You know that the other three guys are flat out not playing and getting surgery/healthy. There’s something scary about a player actually playing when you know that they’re banged up… especially when it’s a quarterback who plays and runs like he’s about 50 pounds heavier than he actually is. 

It’d be best for the long term if Daniels followed suit with the other guys and sat out a week to get healthy; That’s what us normies would do. Daniels isn’t a normie though, he’s one of them ultra-competitor types. 

That’s especially true since the Commanders get the Raiders at home in Week 3. The Raiders just finished laying a real stinker on Monday night. If the Commanders’ could choose one of their first five games to not have a potentially hurt franchise quarterback on the field, it’d probably be this one. 

Geno Smith and the Raiders offense looked very pathetic, but Maxx Crosby and that defense looked just as violent as ever. You’d probably not want Daniels to be running for his life from Crosby on a wonky knee, and you’d probably be cool with Marcus Mariota going head to head with Smith.

Cowboys: Javonte Williams is back?

Per Next Gen Stats, the Cowboys are second in the NFL with +71 rushing yards over expectation. They use a whole bunch of data to find out what the expectation is and I’m sure it checks out.  But also, from a dumb brain-level… Yeah, the Cowboys shouldn’t be able to have as good of a running game as they’ve been having. 

They didn’t make any huge moves in free agency during the offseason. As a matter of fact, when they signed Miles Sanders and Javonte Williams, it was more of a, ‘Okay bud. Good luck with that,’ kind of a thing. 

We all saw Sanders’ fall off after he left the Philadelphia Eagles and had to run behind an offensive line that wasn’t top-tier. And Williams? He was good his rookie season, but after his knee turned to goo in 2022, he’s just been a bum… or so we thought. 

Turns out, Williams might be good again. Back at OTAs in the spring, he told reporters, “I feel completely like myself… I probably can get more flexible and things like that, but as far as healing up, that I feel like is done.”

That’s not the first time he’s said something like that. The summer after his injury, he was talking about his recovery, “It's just all about the evaluation, how the Broncos feel about it. Just seeing how I feel, moving, just trying to get my speed back to normal, things like that.”

He followed that up with a 2023 season where he had 216 carries for 773 yards (3.6 yards per carry) and three touchdowns. That's a crazy level of inefficiency. 

It looks like he’s all good now. The Cowboys are two games into the 2025 season. They played the Eagles and the Giants, two teams with elite, or borderline-elite, defensive lines, and Javonte Williams has been an incredibly solid work-horse running back.

He’s not close to the level of a Saquon Barkley, a Derrick Henry, or a Bijan Robinson, but he’s doing real damage and making defenses respect the Cowboys running game. 

That’s a big deal because the Cowboys offense is built to go through CeeDee Lamb. It felt like when they traded for George Pickens in the offseason to make Lamb’s life easier, that was going to be their only move to help the offense. Apparently that was wrong. 

Then in Week 2, everything was clicking later in the game. With 7:30 left in the third quarter, Williams broke through some traffic at the line of scrimmage and ripped off a 30 yard touchdown run to give the Cowboys their first lead of the game. 

The Cowboys did lose their starting center, Cooper Beebe, for the next six to eight weeks with an ankle thing, but if they can keep this running game going strong, that offense is going to actually be consistently multifaceted.

Right now, he’s had 33 carries for 151 yards (4.6 yards per carry) and three touchdowns. I think I speak for everyone (besides Cowboys fans and people that picked up Williams off the waiver wire) life would be much better if Dallas didn’t have a good running back.

Giants: Resetting the Jaxson Dart clock

Russell Wilson just finished throwing for 450 yards and three touchdowns. That should make the quarterback situation in New Jersey feel a little more solid. It does, but it also doesn’t.

Wilson showed that he’s capable of moving the ball and running that offense, which is much more than you could say about him after Week 1. So, on one hand, that kind of performance definitely will keep the racket about the Giants potentially starting their rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart down for a minute. 

But he also plummeted back down to Earth in overtime. His first drive went nowhere, and on his second chance, he threw an interception that eventually ended the game… and that’s kind of what everyone expected from him.

Jori Epstein of Yahoo Sports said it nicely: “Even with Wilson’s overtime interception, it’s tough to believe Dart would have outperformed a 450-yard, three-touchdown day. Preseason success routinely sows overconfidence in teams, particularly at quarterback when players face vanilla defenses from teams looking to save their best concepts until the regular season.”

She’s referring to Dart playing well in the preseason. If he looked like a pile of mud in August, none of these quarterback conversations would be happening.

Another thing to keep in mind with the Giants is that we’re all dumb. Cool, DangeRuss just had a pretty awesome game… but in Week 3, the Giants are playing the Chiefs on Sunday Night Football.

The Chiefs are 0-2 this season, and are on a three game losing streak going back to last season when they lost 40-6 to the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX. That’s a team that wants to come out and embarrass whoever is on the field with them. 

Can they do that? Maybe, maybe not. But if they can, they will. And if they do, Mr. Unlimited is going to end up looking like a child. If he looks like a child in primetime, everyone is going to forget about his Week 2 game in an instant and the heat is going to turn right back up to where it was. 

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