Jan. 11, 2026, 10:06 p.m. CT
The 2025 season wasn’t a good one for the Dallas Cowboys, who failed to make the playoffs with a below-.500 record. For the first time, a team powered by a healthy Dak Prescott failed to achieve a winning record.
Things never felt right for the Cowboys in 2025, beginning with the uncertainty about bringing back coach Mike McCarthy, which was followed up by the lackluster process of ultimately hiring Brian Schottenheimer, and moved to the drama of trading pass rusher Micah Parsons just before the season started.
Schottenheimer wound up being a solid hire, but the Cowboys weren’t a complete team due to the lack of playmakers on defense. There was too much that went wrong for Jerry Jones’ team in 2025; here are the five biggest factors in the subpar season.
Matt Eberflus’ flop
The Cowboys were a disaster on defense all season, and Eberflus played a big part in the embarrassment. It didn’t help that Jones traded one of the NFL’s best defensive players just days before the regular season, but it’s hard to believe Micah Parsons could have saved the defense from getting shredded all year.
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There were way too many blow coverages, wide open receivers and mistakes that led to the defense giving up the most points in franchise history on Eberflus’ watch. For the first time in the team’s history, Dallas’ defense gave up over 30 points a game. The Cowboys finished at or near the bottom of the league in almost every defensive category.
Eberflus was a bad fit for the Cowboys, and his defense never lived up to their end of the bargain. Everything that could have gone wrong with Eberflus, did.
Free agents and trade acquisitions failed
One of the Cowboys’ strategies last offseason was to bring in highly-drafted players who hadn’t worked out for their respective teams. Jones and the front office brought in three former first-round picks in free agency and two more through trades.
Defensive linemen Payton Turner, Dante Fowler, and Solomon Thomas didn’t work out. Turner never played a down after going on IR before the season, while Fowler and Thomas combined for just three sacks (all from Fowler) and seven tackles for a loss. The Cowboys had a need for defensive line help, and three of their acquisitions didn’t provide much boost.
The same can be said for the trades that saw the team acquire cornerback Kaiir Elam and linebacker Kenneth Murray. Elam was brought in from Buffalo, and the former first-round pick demonstrated the same traits with the Cowboys that he did with the Bills. Unfortunately, that wasn’t positive because Elam was so bad the team cut him in November.
Murray might have been the least productive addition of them all. The former first-round pick was picked on all season and was frequently the player identified in many of the defensive mistakes that ended up in big gains for the offense. It’s hard to mince words, the veteran LB was an awful acquisition for the Cowboys.
The strategy for the Cowboys failed miserably; the team found out what other teams already knew, these players weren’t very good, and it played a role in the putrid defensive performance all season.
Cornerbacks didn’t stack up
When the Cowboys drafted Shavon Revel in April, they looked to create one of the deepest and most talented cornerback rooms in the league. It was a group that included two All-Pros in DaRon Bland and Trevon Diggs, as well as former first-round pick Elam and one of the top CB prospects in the draft in Revel. But the expectations were built around the need for good health.
There were some concerns about Revel and Diggs, but if they could get them on the field, it was expected to be a solid CB unit. Things just never worked out.
Diggs eventually got healthy and was eased into the lineup as the season began, but he wasn’t very good when he played and lost games in the middle of the season to both knee and concussion injuries. Diggs was eventually released by the team before the last game of the season.
Revel also struggled to get back onto the field and wasn’t activated until Week 11. While he did gain valuable experience, Revel wasn’t ready to be a great CB just yet.
The glue guy going into the season was supposed to be Bland, who had inked a huge extension in the offseason, but he was routinely beaten and didn’t look like himself playing in Eberflus’ system. Eventually, Bland also missed time and had foot surgery that leaves his offseason status in doubt.
None of it went right for the Cowboys at CB, which played a large role in the defense being one of the worst units in the league.
Couldn’t get to the QB
After trading Parsons to the Packers, the Cowboys talked about their depth at pass rusher, but that turned out to be a foolish notion. The defense had just 35 sacks on the season, good for 10th worst in the league. It was their worst output since 2020, and their first time under 40 sacks since Parsons was drafted.
Veteran Jadeveon Clowney led the defense in sacks with 8.5, but he wasn’t signed until late September and 4.5 of those came in the last two weeks of the season. The only other player with more than 3.5 sacks was James Houston, who had 5.5, but he had just one in the last seven weeks.
The Cowboys could not consistently get to the quarterback, which didn’t help the backend of the defense. When the Cowboys did get sacks, they came in bunches, but against bad teams. Nearly half of the defense’s sacks (17) came in four games, giving the Cowboys 18 sacks in the other 13 contests.
That wasn’t good enough and why trading Parsons was part of what went wrong in 2025.
Schottenheimer’s lack of aggression
There was a lot to like about the first-time head coach, but his lack of aggression on fourth downs was a big problem. Too many times he failed to go for it when he should have, instead opting to kick field goals, which came back to bite the Cowboys. Losses to the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings, and the tie with Green Bay, might have been avoided if Schottenheimer went for it on fourth down a few more times.
Failing to recognize all season that he had a great offense, but a defense that wasn’t good enough to consistently get stops was a fault he needs to correct heading into next year. Being more aggressive might have been enough to win a few more games in 2025.
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