The Morning After Wk 13 - Winning The Day
Thanksgiving offers the Cowboys taking down Giants with a rare team-football win.
All you have to do is follow the recipe, and good things happen again. It can actually look easy!
Dallas won its first home game of 2024—and its first in 334 days on Thanksgiving—with a decisive dismantling of the New York Giants, 27-20, in a game that was not as close as the final score suggests.
The recipe, so to speak, for the Cowboys to win games in this very difficult league is as follows:
Take care of the football and win the turnover battle.
Allow Micah Parsons and friends to get after the QB.
Run the rock with some level of effectiveness.
When Dallas does those three things, they suddenly look like a competent NFL franchise again—one feeling good about itself with two wins over divisional foes in four days. Wins are starting to come in small bunches, and amazingly, the good feelings and smiles are back.
You’ll have to excuse us for wondering where this football team has been. That said, it’s important to point out that the New York Giants are just awful in many respects right now, so the degree of difficulty in winning home games will vary. Yes, it’s tempting to think the Cowboys discovered some magical formula. While that’s partly true, it often comes down to this: Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia—Dallas’s last three home opponents—are three of the best teams in the league this year. Facing three Super Bowl contenders in succession, all of whom are significantly better in 2024, is bound to leave you looking outmatched. It’s not magic, and there’s no special potion working against Dallas. Those teams are simply better.
On the other hand, when the New York Giants come to town, it’s akin to a baseball team noticing they hit better when not facing an opponent’s top pitchers. Every fifth day, a struggling player is sent to the mound—someone who probably belongs in the minors—and when your team starts hitting well on that day, it isn’t magic. It’s just that the other guy stinks.
So, let’s temper any talk of an upcoming winning streak or a sudden turnaround for everything that’s gone wrong in 2024. The facts remain: these are two football teams far from the league’s best, and someone had to win. The ugly truth is just that—ugly. Coming into this Thanksgiving Day game, Dallas and New York were the only two teams in the NFL without a home win this season. Together, they were 0-11 at home until the Cowboys handed the Giants another loss, allowing Dallas fans to finally leave with a victory. Every other franchise in this 32-team league had already celebrated at least one home win. Now, only the Giants remain winless at home.
So, hey, you’ve got that going for you—which is nice, I guess. Still, some fans are lamenting the Cowboys’ sinking draft position after these back-to-back divisional wins, victories that likely mean little in the grand scheme of things.
To those fans, I can’t offer much solace. If you’re upset about moving from the 9th to the 13th draft pick, maybe it’s best to stop watching games altogether. The players on the field don’t care about draft position. Many of them are playing through injuries for one reason: to beat the team across from them. Winning feels better than losing, and that’s their entire motivation—along with keeping their jobs in professional football next season.
But enough about that. Let’s talk about why they’ve looked reasonably good as a team lately.