For the third straight season, the Dallas Cowboys will play their first home game of the year in the second week of the season.
The previous two years, the Cowboys have been coming off of impressive season-opening wins on the road. In 2023, they pummeled the New York Giants 40-0.
Last year, they rolled over the Cleveland Browns, 33-17.
But the respective second-week games played out far differently.
In 2023, the Cowboys dominated the New York Jets at home, 30-10. But the Jets were without their new starting quarterback, Aaron Rodgers.
Last year, the home opener was a nightmare, as the New Orleans Saints crushed Dallas, 44-19.
In both cases, the second game of the year proved to be a harbinger of the season to come.
Two seasons ago, the Cowboys started 2-0 and won the NFC East with a 12-5 record. Last year, Dallas fell to 1-1 and ended up 7-10.
Some of that record came as a result of losing quarterback Dak Prescott for a little over half the year.
But Dallas was 3-5 with him as a starter, and he lost all three of his starts at home before the season-ending injury against Atlanta.
Clearly, even if the Cowboys open the year with a win over the Eagles in Philadelphia, they must win their season home-opener.
Good Omens Abound
There are plenty of reasons to feel like Dallas will win the second game of the 2025 season.
The first being, they will have 10 days between games to recover. Plenty of time to get recharged, and either build on a strong start, or figure out what went wrong.
The second is who they will be hosting on Sept. 14th.
The New York Giants.
As bad as the Cowboys season went off the rails in 2024, the Giants had it worse. They finished 4-12 last year.
New York has had just one winning season, 9-7-1 in 2022, in the last eight years.
They will be just the balm Dallas needs no matter what the result of the season-opener is.
Historically Speaking
The Cowboys are 77-47-2 all-time against the Giants, having won the last eight meetings overall. At home, they are 42-21-1 and have won the last eight games played at AT&T Stadium.
In Week 2 games, Dallas is 43-22 overall and 23-10 when playing at home.
Before last year’s loss to the Saints, the Cowboys had won six Week 2 games in a row.
Against the Giants in the second week of the season, Dallas is 10-3 overall. They have won four of those six Week 2 meetings at home.
a Dallas Cowboys fan, since the 70’s all the sports media groups need to stop saying and Jerry Jones must realize the Cowboys lost a lot of players through Free agency and retirement in2023 and 2024 and Jerry Jones have the Cowboys seriously over the salary cap so the Cowboys have a lot of holes to fill and replace through the N.F.L. draft so the Cowboys lack a lot of talent in almost every position furthermore with Jerry Jones the Cowboys owner and G.M. I don’t see the Cowboys getting any better I will have to deal with the pain as a Cowboys fan
Jerry Jones don’t have the Cowboys over the salary cap!! They still have plenty of money to spend!! And they didn’t lose a lot of players to free agency and retirement…. Well they did, but there was only a few of them that were any good!! But we have players to take their place and if we didn’t have them, we either signed free agents or drafted players to take the place of the good players we lost!! And we don’t lack talent in almost every position either…. The only real problem we MIGHT have is at left tackle since we don’t know if Tyler Guyton is gonna be any good or not, and right tackle if Steele don’t get back to his pre injury self!! But that’s not a guarantee either, Steele could get back to his pre injury self and be really good at right tackle, and Tyler Guyton can get used to playing left tackle in the NFL and be really good too!! Guyton was raw coming out of college, plus he was a right tackle in college too, so he just needs time, and I think he’ll turn out to be a good player!! And then we might have a problem at the 1 tech position, but even that isn’t guaranteed either cause Mazi Smith is finally gonna get to play his 2nd year in a row at his normal weight, which he didn’t get to do after he was drafted cause Dan Quinn thought it would be a good idea to make him lose weight and play at a weight he wasn’t used to playing at!! Which was obviously a dumb idea!! And then Mike Zimmer made him gain the weight back last year and he started showing flashes at the end of the year, and now he’s gonna be playing his 2nd year at the same weight he ended at last season, so I expect him to be closer to the player he was in college and the player he was drafted to be!! A lot of people don’t realize what Mazi had to go through since being drafted…. He’s had 2 different coordinators in his first 2 years and is now going on his 3rd coordinator, plus he had to go through all the weight changes in his first 2 years too, that’s a lot to put on a player just going into the NFL!! But I think he’ll be better this year since he gets to keep the weight he played with last year!! But other than that, we have good to really good players at every other position on the roster!! This team is loaded with good players, the teams not loaded with all pros and hall of fame caliber players, but they are loaded with good players, so I really don’t know what team your looking at!! And to let you know, Jerry might be the owner and GM but he’s not over the salary cap, that job belongs to Stephen Jones, that’s part of the reason everybody calls him cap boy…. Between that and the fact that he don’t wanna spend big on any good free agents!! But either way Jerry isn’t over the salary cap, it’s his son Stephen!!