Dallas watches Mighty NFC East Flourish
Washington has joined Philadelphia in the NFC Championship Game Round.

Bob Sturm
Jan 20, 2025
You have to admit, the scriptwriters have a sick sense of humor.
If we were to imagine the most painful Jerry Jones matchup for the NFC Championship Game in January 2025, it would be for the Eagles to play the Commanders.
Think about it. Two historical rivals of the Cowboys—perhaps the two biggest rivals in Cowboys history—will meet for the right to go to the Super Bowl. One will do so with a first-year offensive coordinator who was your offensive coordinator 23 months ago, and the other will face him with a first-year head coach who was your defensive coordinator 11 months ago.
The Philadelphia Eagles will do this with Kellen Moore and Doug Nussmeier on their staff, and the Washington Commanders will do this with five former Cowboys coaches on their staff. Dan Quinn is the head coach, Joe Whitt is the defensive coordinator, Sharrif Floyd handles the defensive line, and Anthony Lynn is the running backs coach.
Basically, the coaching staff under Mike McCarthy for the 2022 season! Check it out!

But, wait, there is more!
Five Cowboys from the last few years are part of the Dan Quinn rebuild effort: edge Dorance Armstrong, edge rusher Dante Fowler, center Tyler Biadasz, wide receiver Noah Brown and cornerback Noah Igbinoghene. Each was allowed to leave because they were probably not worth their new price. And yet, they now play in the NFC Championship Game.
That is notable, of course, because Washington was the last and only NFC team with a longer drought than Dallas.
Last year, Detroit ended its long title game drought and now Washington joins them. The irony there is that they played each-other in the 1991 NFC Championship Game and then neither had returned since. That combination were the two teams who Dallas had in their back pocket for years and years to avoid being the team with the longest drought overall. But, now, the other 15 NFC teams have all been there since 2010:
2024 - Washington
2024 - Philadelphia
2023 - San Francisco
2023 - Detroit
2021 - Los Angeles
2020 - Green Bay
2020 - Tampa Bay
2018 - New Orleans
2017 - Minnesota
2016 - Atlanta
2015 - Carolina
2015 - Arizona
2014 - Seattle
2011 - New York
2010 - Chicago
Oh my.
And then you see if you keep scrolling and scrolling:
1995 - Dallas
We all knew this was the truth, but the idea that Washington could basically turn the entire operation around in one year and then go into Detroit and win as it did was way ahead of schedule.
And yet, because of that, the Washington famine has ended—just like Detroit’s did the year before. Now, Detroit has not advanced past the “final four,” and Washington is unlikely to, either. But the fact that Dallas is about to enter its 30th season without even that distinction is not lost on the legions who take it personally.
And now, either the offensive coordinator from the 2022 Cowboys or the defensive coordinator from the 2023 Cowboys will be going to the Super Bowl as a high-ranking coach on a direct rival.
Things are not fun right now for the Jones family. But we wonder if they feel motivated enough to be so upset that they throw resources at the problem and depart from their default habit of doing comfortable things at all times.
Of course, the most comfortable thing might be to wait for Kellen Moore to become available and bring him back to Dallas to try to fix things in his conforming way.
It really makes you wonder how it’s possible that the richest franchise in the world could be outperformed not just by the league’s powerhouses but even by its worst franchises.
Now, Jerry has told us that he doesn’t believe they have been. And he is certainly correct if we just count total wins since 1995, where they sit 11th in the league—well ahead of Washington (25th) and Detroit (31st).

But, there is something to be said about playoff wins, right?

Here, since Super Bowl 30, we do see the five playoff wins compared to Washington’s four and Detroit’s two. Also, there are the Bears at three. Atlanta – mighty, mighty Atlanta have eight post-season wins since then and Carolina is at nine. Both have been to multiple Super Bowls in this stretch.
And Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Green Bay? Well, those teams have 55 playoff wins since 1995 combined and should not really be discussed in this setting as the true rivals of Dallas. Those days might be gone.
Which brings us to my friend Nick. Nick is a subscriber here at Sturmstack and a big P1. He also knows math theories pretty well (much better than I do) and has always been updating me on what appears to be a statistical wonder - How could the Cowboys accidentally miss success over nearly a 30-year sample?
Using probability theory and doing a sequential calculation assuming each season is a random event, the probability of randomly making the conference finals at least once after 30 consecutive seasons is 98.2%. Or if you want to put a negative spin on it, the probability of a team not randomly lucking their way into a conf finals after 30 seasons is only 1.8%. If making the conference finals is an indicator, Jerry is so bad at GM he can't even dumb luck his way into a conference finals after 3 decades. By the way, the coin flip (50 percent threshold) for randomly making the conference finals is approximately once every 5 seasons. In other words, a competent GM would be expected to make the conf finals at least a few times over a 3 decade time span.
NTz
As you can see, he is saying that math suggests you should easily stumble into a conference finals once every few decades and our evidence above verifies. Every single NFC team has done this basically since Mike McCarthy won a Super Bowl in 2010 in Cowboys Stadium (we will include the Bears since that happened 14 days earlier).
We knew this, but we didn’t expect that they would be the last team standing because Washington was always “worse” at the same time for the same basic reason (incompetence at the top).
Now, it is only Dallas in the NFC. What about in the entire NFL? The AFC still has two holdouts that predate 2002 when the Raiders last went.
- Miami - last to the final four in 1992
- Cleveland - last to the final four in 1988
Surely, they have their own tortured fanbases to discuss that and Cleveland is on that list of 12 franchises that have
their own cross to bear:
There are 12 teams that have never hoisted the Lombardi Trophy: the Bills, Browns, Chargers, Jaguars, Lions, Texans, Vikings, Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals and Tennessee Titans.
Now, this is all information that many of you are well aware of, but coming out of this weekend, there did seem to be some Cowboys connections to it all. Especially if their next head coaching hire is generated from picking off the OC from either one of these staffs.
I suppose we simply wonder if any of this will move the needle at all up in Frisco. And, if not, we would then wonder what would move the needle at all anymore?