The Dallas Cowboys lost on Thursday. A loss is a loss. They are 0-1. It was a division game and losing it carries a little more weight than ones that occur outside of the NFC East. We all understand the facts of the matter.

A week and half to assess how to be better will help, but it stands to reason that the way Dallas looked and played will provide the biggest boost. Even before the Micah Parsons trade there were people thinking this group was going to bottom out in 2025, and once he was dealt things really jumped the shark in that sense.

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This isn’t any kind of “watch out, the Cowboys are going to win the Super Bowl” thing, but it’s plausible to feel like this team could win somewhere between 9 and 11 games and challenge for a playoff spot. Heck, if the NFC East proves to not have a repeat winner like the last 20 years have shown, then who knows how weird things get there. One week at a time.

While it is and was disappointing that a star player like CeeDee Lamb did not deliver, the most important thing beyond Dak Prescott playing well is that Brian Schottenheimer looked like the man for the moment. Schotty had the offense moving and grooving before the weather delay sucked all energy out of the building, and what’s more is he had the team ready to ride in the aftermath of the Parsons trade and all of the drama that has been swallowing this team for the last six weeks.

Consider that the Cowboys were, by some oddsmakers’ assessment, 8.5-point underdogs in this game. They never trailed by more than four, the margin they ultimately lost by, which means the spread was over 100% incorrect.

Anyone who has watched the Cowboys for some time knew that this felt off. This is a group that has always shown the ability to challenge and be relevant (not saying this is the goal), but we all began to wonder if the off-the-field things had finally taken too much of a toll. Maybe the back-breaking straw was found.

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That appears to not exactly be the case. The NFL season is incredibly young and a lot will happen that will change how we feel. But do you not believe that the Cowboys will win more games than they don’t?

It is frustrating to acknowledge how good the Philadelphia Eagles are, but nobody else is them. You can make an argument that, despite what lurks around the Thanksgiving time, that the hardest game of the season is now over for the Cowboys. No environment will be like what they were in on Thursday night in the City of Brotherly Love.

Moral victories are hard to take in so let’s not call it that. But as the dust settles on this, last year’s Week 1 win on the road against the Cleveland Browns comes to mind. This is purely my personal opinion, but I cannot recall a season that carried such obvious poor results around the corner as 2024. Everything about that year was broken. Let’s not re-hash it.

But that win at Cleveland provided a brief band-aid on the wound that tore open immediately after and never got any dressing again. This game at Philadelphia feels like the opposite of that. It seems like we examined the wound, acknowledge that it is real and needs time to fully heal, but most important we identified signs of healing taking place.

The darkest part of the night is behind us, for lack of a better term. Here’s to a sunrise being around the corner.