Football is a game of attrition, and every team must deal with injuries over the course of a season. But you need some extra bad mojo to get hit the way the Cowboys got hit with injuries last year.

Every year, Football Outsiders used to publish their statistical study of team health from the previous NFL season, and Aaron Schatz has carried on that tradition at his new site, FTNFantasy.com. For 2024, Schatz determined that the Cowboys were one of the teams hit harder by the injury bug, especially on defense, at least according to their metric called Adjusted Games Lost (AGL). In their own words:

Adjusted games lost doesn’t just add up total injuries. It accounts for both absent players and those playing at less than 100%, and it specifically measures injuries to expected starters and important situational players rather than little-used backups. As such, AGL estimates the impact of injuries on teams and provides a comparable total that often succinctly explains why teams improved or declined from one year to the next.

By this definition, the Cowboys finished the 2024 season with 84.7 Adjusted Games Lost. Ranking teams from the healthiest (#1 Baltimore with 16.3 AGL) to the most injured (#32 San Francisco, 141.2 AGL), the Cowboys ranked 19th overall. Just a year before, the Cowboys were quite a bit healthier, ranking 10th overall with an AGL of 51.8. The following table shows where the Cowboys have ranked over the years in terms of AGL.

Dallas Cowboys’ Rank in Adjusted Games Lost to Injury, 2008-2024

Year
’08
’09
’10
’11
’12
’13
’14
’15
’16
’17
’18
’19
’20
’21
’22
’23
’24

Rank
18
3
7
18
28
18
19
5
16
5
17
4
28
n.a.
18
10
19

On balance, the Cowboys have enjoyed slightly above average injury luck over the last 16 years: in five of the last 16 seasons (marked in green) they were among the least-injured teams in the league, eight years (no color) saw them slightly above or slightly below a league-average AGL, and two seasons (red) saw them at the bottom of the league in terms of AGL.

But 2024 proved to be a double whammy for the Cowboys. Not only did they have a high AGL rate, those AGL proved to be highly concentrated.

The table below highlights the highly asymmetric injury distribution on defense in 2024:

Cowboys starters and games lost to injury in 2024

POS
Player
Games started
Games Lost to Injury

CB
Daron Bland
7
10

CB
Trevon Diggs
11
6

CB
Josh Butler
3
5

CB
Caelen Carson
5
10

Total Corners
26
31

DE
Marshawn Kneeland
2
6

DE
DeMarcus Lawrence
4
13

DE
Sam Williams
– –
17

DE
Micah Parsons
13
4

Total DEs
19
40

LB
DeMarvion Overshown
12
4

OG
Zack Martin
10
7

OT
Chuma Edoga
4
11

QB
Dak Prescott
8
9

WR
Brandin Cooks
9
7

TE
Jake Ferguson
14
3

Total All Others
57
41

The Cowboys were hit hard by injuries at corner and defensive end. In 2024, the defense was ranked 24th in the league with 52.9 Adjusted Games Lost. The offense on the other hand, despite the high-profile injury to Dak Prescott, ranked a league average 15th with 31.8 Adjusted Games Lost.

Statistically speaking, there are two main reasons for optimism in the numbers presented above, “regression to the mean” and “normal distribution”.

Regression to the mean

This statistical phenomenon describes the fact that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement. In our case today, it means that teams with a high injury rate one year tend to have a better injury situation in the following year, while teams with an extremely low injury rate tend to have more injuries the following year.

Specifically, it’s quite likely that the Cowboys defense will see a fewer injuries in 2025.

We know that injuries are a fact of life in the NFL. We also know that a good amount of injuries suffered are random: the healthiest team in 2023 (Rams: 25.6 AGL) dropped all the way to 23rd last year (90.8 AGL); the Texans ranked 32nd in 2023 and improved to 21st, an improvement of 69 AGL!

These types of swings happen every year, but they are the outliers. Most teams will oscillate to various degrees around the league average, and that’s a reasonable expectation for the Cowboys defense in 2025. And that little bit of extra health may be all the team needs to get back to the playoffs.

Normal distribution

Without going into discussions about bell curves and standard deviations, a normal distribution in statistics holds that the most common values are near the mean and the less common values are progressively farther away from it.

In the simplest possible terms for the Cowboys: The Cowboys should expect a better distribution of the injuries across the entire roster, and the defense specifically, which in turn should make the impact of those injuries less crippling.

You saw in the table above how the injuries were clustered at DE and CB. Expect that to change as injuries will be more evenly distributed across the entire roster.

Unfortunately, while that normal distribution should be good news for corners and ends, it may signal bad news for positions like safety, running back, and tight end, where the Cowboys had very low injury rates. Don’t expect a repeat of that this year.

Overall, it’s quite reasonable to expect the Cowboys to have better injury luck this year. Will it be enough to make the playoffs?

I don’t know, but I think it will be.

And our old friend Ed Werder seems to agree, and he makes his case in a tl;dr-friendly three sentences.

I think people fail to realize how poorly the Cowboys performed on defense. A lot of injuries to DE and CB and challenging to lose that many players at those positions. But expecting defense to be much improved. https://t.co/nORr39oZij

— Ed Werder (@WerderEdNFL) June 18, 2025