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Whenever the Cowboys have success, people always say that they’re unable to build off of it.
People say this for a reason, though. It is true that the Cowboys have had an extreme amount of difficulty putting back-to-back successful seasons together.
Sunday night the Philadelphia Eagles locked up the NFC East, meaning the Cowboys won’t repeat as division champions. This, to people’s point, is not shocking.
Cowboys have not won the NFC East in back to back seasons since they did so in 1995 and 1996. They'll have to try and begin again in 2018.
— RJ Ochoa (@rjochoa) December 11, 2017
The Cowboys have only won the NFC East five times since they repeated as division champions in 1996: 1998, 2007, 2009, 2014, & 2016. They did return to the playoffs in 1999 as a wildcard team, but they obviously did not win the division.
Winning your division isn’t necessarily the mark of living up to hype, to be fair. Sometimes you’re in a season that has a team within your division that just catches fire, and wildcard spots are welcome; however, the Cowboys are on the outside looking in there.
Dak Prescott on ESPY red carpet asked who is gonna win NFC East: "We're the Cowboys. We're gonna win the NFC East." pic.twitter.com/Goli1r73sq
— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) July 12, 2017
2017 has been weird in many capacities for the Cowboys, including the will-they-or-won’t-they issue of suspension that hovered over Ezekiel Elliott for so much of it.
The reality is that, while they are still technically mathematically alive in the playoff hunt, the Cowboys have been underwhelming this season by a wide margin.
It’s been a long time since the NFC East has featured one team that dominated it year after year. You’d have to go back to the four consecutive titles from Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb in Philadelphia to find anything particularly epic.
NFC East Winners since Jason Garrett has been on the Cowboys coaching staff in any capacity:
— RJ Ochoa (@rjochoa) December 11, 2017
2007- Cowboys
2008- Giants
2009- Cowboys
2010- Eagles
2011- Giants
2012- Redskins
2013- Eagles
2014- Cowboys
2015- Redskins
2016- Cowboys
2017- Eagles
Every year since Jason Garrett has been associated with the Dallas Cowboys and they’ve won the NFC East has been followed up with extreme disappointment and/or an injury that helped ruin the season. It’s an age-old cliche at this point.
It’s been over 20 years since the Cowboys put together consecutive seasons that saw them sit atop the NFC East. Over 20 years! That’s hard to accept at some point.
Hopefully the Cowboys can win the NFC East in 2018 and 2019, but for now they’ll have to shift their 2017 focus exclusively to a wildcard route.