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The Football Notebook: Red River’s Majesty, Manchester City’s Strange Win and the NFC East’s Diasterclass
Welcome to The Football Notebook, the weekly repository where I digest the football weekend that was while simultaneously racking my brain for answers about the existential problems of the universe.
More like the NFC Least, am I right?
Yes, I know that joke is probably old enough to rent a car by now, but sometimes circumstances demand that the classics be brought out of retirement. The NFC East spent this weekend producing such an impressive collection of football disasters that calling the division “least” almost feels too generous. Let’s run through the list:
Dallas got embarrassed by a winless team. Not good, chief.
The Eagles somehow turned a lead with eight seconds left into a loss. OK, that’s not great either.
The Giants-Commanders game ended in a tie after Washington had ample opportunity to make sure it didn’t. Oh, no.
I’ve watched a lot of terrible NFC East football in my life, but even by our remarkably low standards, this was special.
Dallas started the festivities Thursday night against the previously winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I had convinced myself this could be a useful game for the Cowboys, mostly because Tampa Bay looked vulnerable enough to offer some hope. Maybe Dallas could finally stop looking like a team trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions.
Instead, the Cowboys got completely skull-dragged in front of the entire country. The coaching staff looked lost for long stretches, while the players did very little to make the people on the sideline look any smarter. By the end of it, I was so genuinely distressed that I barely spoke for close to 18 hours.
I wish that were an exaggeration designed to make this section funnier, but it is not. I spent most of Friday moving through life like some character in a 19th-century novel who had just received terrible news by telegram. Cowboys fandom does this to people. Every year you tell yourself there must be a point where the suffering becomes familiar enough to stop hurting, and every year Dallas discovers some fresh little wrinkle.
Philadelphia at least had the decency to make the rest of us feel slightly less alone. The Eagles kicked a go-ahead field goal against Jacksonville with eight seconds remaining, which should be the sort of thing that ends a football game unless somebody on the other side has access to a time machine. Somehow, Jacksonville still won 19-17.
Cowboys fans had already watched their own team pull off something disturbingly similar only a couple of weeks earlier, so there was a strange comfort in seeing Philadelphia walk into the same trap. It did absolutely nothing to improve Dallas’ season, but watching a rival experience the exact flavor of pain you recently tasted has some medicinal value.
Then came the Giants and Commanders, who decided the division had not yet suffered enough. Their game ended in a 27-27 tie after Washington had a chance to pursue the winning points and instead handled the closing moments like a team trying to preserve a draw in the Champions League group stage.
A field goal wins the game. That is not advanced coaching theory. You do not need Bill Walsh’s playbook or a room full of analysts to explain it. The posts are right there, and the whole point of the exercise is to put the ball between them before the clock runs out.
Washington somehow turned that basic objective into something wildly complicated. Jayden Daniels and Dan Quinn let the clock disappear, and the game ended with neither side winning. It felt less like a result and more like the league office had stepped in to protect everyone from themselves.
The NFC East has become remarkably creative in how it reaches the same disappointing destination. It doesn’t look like that’s going to end anytime soon.