The Dallas Cowboys being extremely relevant and on the cusp of a division title, as we all do our Christmas shopping, is a very enjoyable experience.
The cold isn’t as bitter. Those special sugar cookies are a little sweeter. Everything we do, look at, or experience is made all the more great by America’s Team being at the top of the NFC East with yuletide greetings.
As you can imagine Cowboys fans are feeling quite good about the state of things. Each week we’ve been measuring confidence of the fan base with SB Nation’s FanPulse tool and we are almost at a season high. In fact you could actually argue that we have topped out during the season as the only point where confidence was higher was before any games had kicked off.
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Growth has been incremental over the five-game win streak that the Cowboys are riding, and maybe that’s because we’ve all been scarred before. The peaks and valleys from earlier in the season were much more sharp and large in terms of the direction they jumped, but lately fans are coming ever so slowly out of the woodwork to believe again.
The largest movement thus far has been the drop following Week 1’s loss to the Carolina Panthers. You’d have thought that maybe the wins over New Orleans or Philadelphia (last week, I know you’re confused since the Cowboys swept the Eagles this season, it’s never not fun to say) would have caused larger jumps, but again, people are reserved.
Dallas is a win (or a loss from Philly and Washington) away from securing their third division title in five seasons. While the Eagles won the Super Bowl in that stretch of time, 60% success rate is pretty impressive regardless of what team you’re talking about. That merits some serious belief in the organization (not total belief, obviously).
The rest of the NFC East is either sad or delusional
With the division basically wrapped up under the Christmas tree at AT&T Stadium (hopefully it’ll be opened before December 25th) it’s understandable that the three stooges in the NFC East would be feeling quite down. That’s definitely the case.
Both the Eagles and Redskins fan bases have reached the point of fandom where they’re curled up in a ball and sobbing because the season went south. Such is life in sports, although Philadelphia has a lot more problems than just losing.
What’s interesting to note here is that fans of the New York Giants are actually feeling quite good about their team. To be fair the G-Men have won four of their last five games, but to be equally fair Eli Manning is still their quarterback. Whatever helps them sleep at night, I guess.