A couple weeks ago, after the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants before heading into their bye week, I figured they were in for a couple tough games coming off their open date with meetings in Green Bay and against the Detroit Lions.
I also thought the Packers would beat them at Lambeau Field and that would make it tougher on the Lions to tag the defending Super Bowl Champions with a second straight loss. As it turned out, the Lions didn’t have to beat the Eagles and pin them with consecutive losses, and after the Eagles beat the Packers on the road they got by the Lions at home.
Okay.
In my years of working in professional football I have taken some lessons that pay dividends year-after-year. One of them I learned while working my first season with the Oakland Raiders. That year, the Raiders opened their 1973 season with a road game against the Minnesota Vikings. That game was followed by a home meeting with the defending Super Bowl Champion Miami Dolphins and a third week contest in Kansas City against the Chiefs.
The Vikings, one of the best teams in football at the time, beat us on opening day. The next week, we ended the Dolphins record 18 straight wins with a narrow 12-7 victory. The Dolphins first loss since 1971. On the Thursday before we left for our game against the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium, I was at my workstation in the Raiders locker room and offensive backfield coach Paul Roach said to me and Tom Flores, “Well before the season started I would have taken two wins in the first three weeks.”
I viewed the comment as the kiss of death.
Roach was attributing our triumph over the Dolphins as paramount to winning two of our first three games given we were favored against a below average Kansas City team the next Sunday. Overconfident, as evidenced by Roach’s comment, the Raiders lost to the Chiefs and started the 1973 season with one win in the first three weeks.
Now, don’t you know that the Eagles were looking at their upcoming schedule during their bye week and thinking that those first two games, against the Packers on the road and the Lions at Lincoln Financial Field, were going to be real challenges. And yet, their road game against a division opponent, like the Chiefs were for the Raiders so many years ago, was going to be an easier to collect win.
Once the Raiders beat the Dolphins, they had nothing left for the Chiefs.
Once the Eagles beat the Packers and Lions, well you perhaps get my point.
The Cowboys look like an easy road win, certainly not as challenging as the two victories they picked up against the Packers and Lions. And yet, from a motivational perspective, this is a trap with enormous potential for an underdog home win.
The Cowboys, perhaps really did retool their defense though deadline trades and come together as a team in stark contrast to the squad that played the first half of the season with a swinging gate stop unit. Against the Raiders last Monday night, Dallas, to our surprise, looked like a well-oiled machine on both sides of the ball. Easily compensating for an early game fumble that staked the Silver and Black to a lead and dominating the rest of the night with the look of a team that is headed in the right direction.
I’m not in the Eagles locker room, so I don’t have firsthand comments like I did with the Raiders years ago. But, seeing what happened on the field, and knowing how humans react to success, I suggest the Eagles are headed into an upset loss this Sunday in Big D.
Qoxhi Picks: Dallas Cowboys (+3) over Philadelphia Eagles