Quick Slant: TNF - Not Peak, but Prologue
Mat Irby's Quick Slant
If the rivalries of the NFC East are like embers that never snuff out, Philadelphia and Dallas’ is a perpetual conflagration. Their rivalry isn’t seasonal, but generational—each offseason a Cold War, and their annual meetings, seven hours spilling out over two days in the fall like Shiloh.
This time, the Eagles come in draped in the spoils of February. When the NFL was a small circle of men, the Greasy Neale Eagles of 1947-1948 were champions. In the decades that followed, they endlessly reached for a piece of the Cowboys, from Landry to Jimmy Johnson, ultimately clutching at air again and again—this, despite the independent genius of Vermeil, Ryan, and Reid, who all won elsewhere. But today, they are the winners of two Lombardi Trophies in less than a decade, while the Cowboys have perfected vapid marketability to caricature.
This Thursday, the Eagles take the field not only to claim more jewelry but hopefully to further their new lineage of domination. They are at their apex. A loaded roster returns almost intact, with HC Nick Sirianni entrenched and QB Jalen Hurts in his prime. The stakes for the Eagles aren’t desperation but preservation: to show that last winter wasn’t peak but prologue.
The Cowboys arrive diminished, even beyond the decades-long oblivion they’ve made for themselves. For a decade, this team has sold itself as one piece away. Last Thursday, GM Jerry Jones cashed out his most singular piece, leaving new HC Brian Schottenheimer to pilot a ship already taking on water, and leaving a fanbase to see admission that this edition of the Cowboys will never get over this edition of the Eagles as the only logical explanation. The Micah Parsons trade was more than a transaction; it was an identity fracture for a franchise that once built its name on corralling big-name stars rather than forcing their departure. Once an impenetrable empire with a crystalline palace, Dallas now embodies collapse to anyone younger than 40 who’s still paying attention.
Thursday night isn’t just a game. It’s the first flare calling Sparta and Troy back to war another time. This isn’t just about 2025 wins; it’s a flag-planting moment where the Eagles can, once and for all, prove they’ve outgrown their greatest rival, vanquishing them to a class they’ve long since absconded. And it’s about whether or not the Cowboys, ushered to the door, will go out with a whimper or kicking and screaming. The stakes are not 1-0 vs. 0-1; they are existential.
Eagles
Implied Team Total: 28
The Eagles are champions of the world and no counterfeit. Sometimes, a team crawls through autumn, bleeding and thirsty, only to stumble into January with busted shoes and hit triple-sevens. This wasn’t that; by the time Philadelphia wept under confetti, it felt as if the throne had been custom-tailored for them all along.
Pythagorean wins expose the gap between story and score. Some 10-win teams are contenders. Some are born of smoke and mirrors; likewise, some teams catch the wrong end of variance, losing more games than they should.
Stemming from baseball, Pythagorean wins were introduced by Sabermetrics’ Bill James, a leading-edge progenitor of the analytics movement in general and an advisor to the Boston Red Sox squad that finally broke the curse. Using points for and points against to derive the actual potency of a team, they can help us cut through luck to see the real identity of a team beneath whatever embellishments their record tells us.
The Eagles finished second in Pythagorean wins in the 2024 regular season, trailing only the Lions, who the surprising Commanders dispatched to set up an all-East NFC Championship game.
The Eagles were dominant in EPA per play, both offensively…
… and defensively.
Philly stretched out toward the finish line like the grand thunder of timpani to close Beethoven’s Ninth—their only mishap, enduring a preposterous theft after causing five turnovers, yanked along by the swell of a crowd on fire, witnessing the birth of a superstar, as Jayden Daniels found Jamison Crowder with six seconds to play in Landover. They got their revenge weeks later, passing through the Commanders like a turnstile on their way to the Super Bowl. This Eagles team was the best the league had to offer at the season’s climax; their championship was realer than their 2018 gambit. No trickery was needed at all; the Eagles just bludgeoned Mahomes and the Chiefs until it wasn’t fun.
Offensive linemen Fred Johnson (Jaguars) and Mekhi Becton (Chargers) depart with 1,383 snaps between them. Becton’s career renaissance would theoretically yield to a new iteration with the equally underwhelming Kenyon Green; instead, it appears the Eagles will start the season by turning one of its guard slots over to Tyler Steen. Based on past PFF grades, Steen seems to be a liability, but one weak link on an offensive line can be offset when the rest are of high quality. LG Landon Dickerson has struggled with back and knee injuries, but is already participating fully in practice. When healthy, PFF expects the Eagles to maintain the best OL in the NFL.
Otherwise, the offensive starters return intact.
The defending rushing champ, RB Saquon Barkley, touched the ball 482 times, playoffs included, in 2024. This was the tenth-highest total by an NFL RB on record and the most since DeMarco Murray in 2014.
We can see from the scatterplot that the heyday for RB touches, including playoffs, was in the 1990s, when the schedule was 16 games and playoff formats expanded to 12 teams. Since 2001, only three RBs have ranked in the top 20 all-time, even with the season extended to 17 games and the playoffs expanded to 14 teams. This is because the rise of the running back by committee has more than offset league growth.
As a fantasy entity, Barkley has two independent dilemmas causing him to fall behind WRs Ja’Marr Chase, CeeDee Lamb, and fellow RBs Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs in ADP:
For one, despite his historically high touch volume, Barkley ranked only 14th in high-value touches (receptions and green-zone touches). He is not heavily utilized as a receiver in the Philadelphia offense, despite having been a proven weapon in the passing game since his rookie season. And his goal-line usage is limited by the Tush-Push, which gave Hurts 19 green-zone touches of his own in 2024.
Frankly, it is rare for an RB to do so little in the passing game and still emerge as the RB1 overall, and yet, in 2024, both the RB1 and RB2 overall (Derrick Henry) finished outside the top 25 RBs in targets, as I covered earlier this summer. Only four RBs in the past 20 seasons have finished as the RB1 overall and outside of the top ten in RB YAC, including Barkley in 2024. This strikes me as anomalous and unlikely to repeat.
But also, there’s the matter of Barkley’s volume carrying over from one year to another. The curse of 370 is well-trodden ground; in 2011, it was reported by Tristan H. Crockroft (building on a concept credited to Aaron Schatz) that the track record for 370-carry seasons is brutal. According to the article, of the 28 backs to hit that mark at the time, 71% missed at least one game the following year (compared to 41% of 300–369 carry backs), averaging 3.3 games lost versus 1.6. Only LaDainian Tomlinson in 2003 matched his prior fantasy points. All but three saw at least a 20% drop, and nearly a third lost over half their points. By contrast, only 20% of the 270–369 group collapsed as badly.
It is also highly unlikely to repeat as the RB1 overall, as I detailed for RotoViz in 2024. Since 1980, only Barry Sanders, Emmitt Smith, Marshall Faulk, Priest Holmes, and Christian McCaffrey have gone back-to-back as RB1 overall, with Faulk doing it three times in a row and Smith doing it four. Counting Smith as three back-to-back outcomes and Faulk as two, that makes only eight times in 45 years that an RB has repeated in consecutive seasons.
“Since 2000, players who have finished as the overall RB1 have scored an average of 65.5% of their initial point total the following season. They have scored an average of 75.8% of their initial point total in their highest remaining career year. Removing 2021-2023 results, they have scored an average of 78.5%. Using medians to remove outliers (like David Johnson’s 2017), players have scored 112.9 fewer points in their ensuing year after being the overall RB1. They have scored 101.6 fewer in their best season after being the RB1.”
Barkley is tough to diagnose because of the many factors working against him. But the Eagles could have a massive advantage up front in the run game.
In addition to a new hole at RG for Philly to plug, Dallas will look different up front. Lost in the Micah Parsons deal, the Cowboys received DT Kenny Clark. Clark was once borderline elite, but he’s far removed from his three Pro Bowl seasons in Green Bay. If he were still that run-stuffer, his addition might have softened the Parsons blow, since Dallas has more depth on the edge, and run defense was their biggest weakness in 2024. As it stands, Clark is a 314-pound body past his prime. His presence next to Osa Odighizuwa looks stronger on paper than anything the Cowboys had a year ago, and with rookie Jay Toia, a 342-pounder, backing them up, there may be more push inside, where Philly torched Dallas last time they met. Still, we should expect a mismatch in favor of Philadelphia up the middle.
The Eagles were not an elite pass-blocking unit according to Fantasy Points’ pressure rate over expected (PrROE) data, where they finished 25th. Conversely, the Cowboys were a strong unit for producing pressure, ranking third in defensive PrROE, which gives them an assumed advantage on paper. We should be wary of trusting this data without Parsons in the soup. Still, additions of Dante Fowler, Jr. (Commanders) and Donovan Ezeiruaku (Boston College), who many called one of the steals of the NFL Draft, supplement Sam Williams and Marshawn Kneeland to make a passable core. Hurts is in the middle of the pack in terms of handling pressure.
The Eagles are blessed with one of the best WR tandems in the NFL with A.J. Brown and Devonta Smith. TE Dallas Goedert is a strong top-half pass-catching TE who has continually supplemented the passing attack well, giving the Eagles a very concentrated stable of pass-catchers, which is excellent for fantasy.
Last season, the Eagles ranked dead last in pass rate over expected (PROE). Typically, this trend will regress year-over-year. Although the Eagles may continue to be more predisposed to the run than most, we shouldn’t necessarily expect them to run as frequently as they did a year ago. Despite their run-heaviness, the Eagles ran the third-most plays in the NFL in 2024, trailing only the Browns and Cowboys.
The Cowboys’ secondary is also much maligned. Despite two big-play mavens, DaRon Bland and Trevon Diggs, manning the corners, Dallas surrendered 0.73 fantasy points/dropback, tied for most in the league. And despite his considerable reputation, Diggs ranked 91st in PFF grade among CBs in 2024, the worst finish of his career.
The Cowboys turn the keys to the defense over to former Chicago HC Matt Eberflus. Dallas ran the 12th-most man coverage in 2024. Expect them to run far more zone in 2025, as in Eberflus’ final full year as Bears’ coach—a 2023 season in which he largely coordinated the defense—the Bears ran the sixth-most man and sixth-most Cover 3. Regardless of whether or not Eberflus runs the same defense, we can deduce that he should be more prone to these looks than the Cowboys were under Mike Zimmer in 2024.
Smith scored 0.51 fantasy points/route against Cover 3, ranking 27th, while Brown ranked 36th with .46. There are extensive variables in moving from one season to the next, but an Eberflus defense like the one he ran in 2024 should mark improvement against one of the most potent total offenses in the NFL. Will it be even close to enough?
