It’s a funny thing, the NFL offseason. It’s been mentioned on these pages several times, but somehow the disgust for how Dallas’ season ended with playoff disaster, and their lack of movement of locking up their big stars and coaching staff to extensions, has morphed into a condemnation on their chances for this season.
Sure, there’s a chance that the lame-duck approach could cause things to go down the drain, and there’s a chance that CeeDee Lamb’s prolonged absence from the prep work could lead to a down year from the All-Pro, but all in all, the Cowboys are still a viable double-digit win expectation. Most observers not emotionally tied to things agree, including ESPN’s Bill Barnwell (paywall).
Barnwell recently released his list of five teams that are likely to decline and while two NFC East teams make the list, Dallas isn’t one of them.
And these aren’t fly-by-night, quick hit opinions without substance. Barnwell inked over 1,500 words on each of the five predictions, using advanced statistical analysis to support his regression theories.
Barnwell predicted both the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles would decline in 2023, and they did. The Eagles dropped from 14-3 to 11-6 and the Giants dropped from 9-7 to 6-11. Now he’s saying further issues are ahead for both teams from the northeast.
For the Giants, things are centered around a regression in turnover differential and a full season of Daniel Jones at quarterback.
Why are the Giants back here? Well, as scary as this might be for the fan base, they might have actually been a little lucky to even finish with six wins.
Let’s start with something I mentioned in Monday’s column: turnover differential. Picking the team that led the league in turnover differential to decline is often a wise move.
For the Eagles, their predicted decline is centered around the fact that truly good teams don’t struggle to win as often as Philadelphia did and a regression to the norm seems likely.
The Eagles already dropped from 14-3 in 2022 to 11-6 in 2023, but the evidence suggests they were lucky to even come away with those 11 victories. While this is the most difficult projection of the bunch to parse, I’m concerned they might still have some ground to cover before hitting bottom after their 28-5 stretch between the end of 2021 and the halfway point of 2023.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. The Eagles were within a touchdown of being outscored last season. While they had some impressive victories in close games — they beat the Bills, Chiefs and Cowboys in narrow contests — that’s not something we associate with teams that produce double-digit victories, even in the 17-game era.
To think of things another way, the Eagles outscored their opposition by 0.3 points per game. If we take the 73 teams from 1989 to 2022 that outscored the teams they played by an average of between 0-1 points per game and see how they performed, just 11 of those teams produced double-digit win totals. Unsurprisingly, they were 74-25 in one-score games that season. And also unsurprisingly, they went 40-43 in those same contests the following season.
And despite including Washington on his list of five teams set to improve, where he did mention Dallas was a consideration for the decline list, ranking two teams they cleared bodes well for the Cowboys’ chances to repeat as NFC East champions.