On Thanksgiving Day, the Dallas Cowboys underscored their seriousness about the 2025 season with a 31-28 victory over the Chiefs, giving them wins over the last two Super Bowl champs four days apart. As the rest of the final weekend of November played out, however, the club’s status changed.

The Cowboys are not really a genuine wild-card contender. They are very much alive, however, in the NFC East. That crazy statistic about no team having won the East in consecutive seasons since 2004 is suddenly back in play.

At 6-5-1, the Cowboys have a better chance of catching the Philadelphia Eagles than they do of running down any of the wild-card contenders. The Cowboys were part of an upset special Thursday when Green Bay, Cincinnati and Dallas all beat favored teams. When the Chicago Bears surprisingly continued that trend in a Black Friday game at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ lead over Dallas fell to 1 1/2 games. It had been 3 1/2 games just five days earlier.

Eagles fans fear they have seen this story before. And it’s one of an epic collapse. In 2023, coming off of a Super Bowl loss to Kansas City — a game the Eagles had tied with five minutes to play — Philadelphia began the next season on a 10-1 tear. It was a house of cards. The Eagles were winning close games by the thinnest of margins, the luckiest turn of events. When the skid came, they finished 11-6 and were blown out at Tampa Bay in a first-round playoff loss.

That season the Cowboys trailed Philly by two games with six to play and didn’t exactly go strutting down the stretch, losing consecutive games in Buffalo and Miami. But that 4-2 finish was enough to get to 12-5 and take the East back from the fading Eagles.

Can something similar happen over the next five weeks? The answer is yes, but first let’s examine why that is the Cowboys’ only practical hope for postseason play.

San Francisco has looked like a vulnerable wild-card team all season with its abundance of injuries that include lots of comings and goings among receivers and the loss of Nick Bosa and Fred Warner, their two best defenders, for the season. And leading Cleveland just 10-8 at halftime, maybe the Browns and their powerful defense would knock off the 49ers and help the wild-card cause. A fumble and a muffed punt changed all that, setting up two touchdowns and allowing San Francisco to roll on to a 9-4 record.

It’s unrealistic to think Dallas can catch any of the three West contenders — Rams and Seahawks at 9-3 and 49ers at 9-4. Add to that the Bears and Packers’ victories that leave those NFC North rivals at 9-3 and 8-3-1. All of these teams battling for the three wild-card spots in the conference have better records than the Eagles, not to mention nothing resembling Philly’s sluggish offense.

Hard to believe that the team that led the Chiefs 40-6 in last year’s Super Bowl looks so inept for such long stretches on offense. The Cowboys are the only team the Eagles scored 21 points against in their last four games. And they finished here with 41 scoreless minutes. They didn’t get their next touchdown until nearly 37 minutes deep into the Chicago game (a five-quarter stretch against the Cowboys and Bears in which they scored three points) when suddenly Jalen Hurts and A.J. Brown remembered how to connect play after play.

So what lies ahead?

The Cowboys obviously have to continue their three-game win streak Thursday night in Detroit, and even with the Lions falling to the Packers, this is the toughest game remaining on Dallas’ schedule. Might even be the last time they are an underdog, pending how the Chargers are playing when they come to Dallas Dec. 21. The Cowboys will be solid favorites in all the rest against New York, Washington and the awful Minnesota Vikings, although Sunday night’s overtime game with Denver reminded us that it’s not smart to simply assume a Cowboys’ win on Christmas Day in Landover. And the Eagles have two games remaining against Washington.

Philadelphia’s schedule is slightly tougher, facing their two best opponents — the Chargers Monday night and Buffalo Dec. 28 — on the road. Even if you give the Eagles layups against the Commanders twice and the Raiders, they would have to play a lot better than they did at home against Chicago to win in LA.

So it’s not impossible by any means for the Cowboys to take a 3 1/2 game deficit and trim it to a single 1/2 game in barely two weeks. But they have work to do in Detroit, and as good as the Cowboys are properly feeling after knocking off the Eagles and Chiefs, beating a good team on the road is something Dallas has not accomplished in more than a year.

The Cowboys are back in the East race, to be sure. Now they have to do the rest.

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