{"id":991500,"date":"2026-09-04T09:18:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/991500\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T09:18:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:18:19","slug":"why-regression-to-the-mean-may-be-the-cowboys-secret-weapon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/991500\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Regression to the Mean May Be the Cowboys\u2019 Secret Weapon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Dak Prescott signals to CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys during the first quarter in the game against the Denver Broncos at Empower Field At Mile High on October 26, 2025. (Jamie Schwaberow\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The Dallas Cowboys can never be accused of flying under the radar. As I wrote here<\/a>, the franchise seems to exist in a permanent state of championship-or-bust, with every season made to feel more consequential league-wide than it probably is:<\/p>\n

But on the eve of the 2026 season, it\u2019s tough to know quite what to make of this year\u2019s version of the Cowboys. <\/p>\n

From 2021-23, Dallas went exactly 12-5<\/a> for three consecutive seasons, making the playoffs three years in a row for the first time since 1996. Though that team bowed out before making the NFC title game all three years \u2014 what else is new?<\/a> \u2014 it wasn\u2019t hard to project that regular-season success into a deep playoff run sooner or later. After back-to-back seven-win campaigns, though \u2014 each of which happened<\/a> for differently confounding reasons<\/a> \u2014 the Cowboys have landed in a place that\u2019s even harder to pin down.<\/p>\n

The 2024 Cowboys could reasonably blame their collapse on an injury to Dak Prescott\u2026 except that they were already 3-5<\/a> by the time Prescott was lost for the season. And the 2025 version didn\u2019t even offer that much in the way of explanations. Prescott returned to lead one of the NFL\u2019s elite passing attacks \u2014 it was an off-numbered year<\/a>, after all \u2014 starting all 17 games and producing Top-5 QB EPA stats<\/a>. But Dallas\u2019 defense was so bad<\/a> that they still went just 7-9-1, with a three-game winning streak at midseason representing the only time they won consecutive games<\/a> at all.<\/p>\n

And yet, that same imbalance may actually be Dallas\u2019 best reason for optimism in 2026.<\/p>\n

According to NFLverse\u2019s Expected Points Added<\/a> (EPA) metrics, last year\u2019s Cowboys ranked No. 7 in offensive EPA per game above average (+5.3) and No. 5 in passing particularly (+5.7). But at the same time, they not only had the worst EPA-per-game defense relative to average (-11.3) in the league last season, but the worst in any season since at least 2003 \u2014 as far back as my complete dataset went \u2014 and the third-worst relative passing defense (-8.5) over that span as well:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

That was down from a defense that was merely normal-bad (27th with -3.0 EPA per game vs. average) in 2024, though no one especially batted an eye at a defensive collapse for Dallas \u2014 not after they dealt Micah Parsons to Green Bay<\/a> on the eve of the seasons. But that might just be our star-bias speaking: As friend of the Substack Ethan Strauss<\/a> argued recently, non-QB NFL players don\u2019t impact team success as much<\/a> as the media hype suggests. (And it\u2019s not like Parsons helped the Packers defense avoid slipping from sixth to 22nd, anyway.)<\/p>\n

This resulted in Dallas having the seventh-biggest split between their opponent-adjusted EPA per game on offense and on defense since 2003. And because of their extreme mismatch between offense and defense, the 2025 Cowboys had one of the most unhinged week-to-week profiles of any team: Never once did they post an above-average EPA performance on both sides of the ball at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Compounding their one-dimensionality, Dak and the passing attack \u2014 specifically throwing to WR George Pickens and, to a lesser extent, WR CeeDee Lamb, TE Jake Ferguson and WR Ryan Flournoy \u2014 were far more efficient relative to league average than RB Javonte Williams and the rushing attack, which ranked 19th in EPA per game. There\u2019s a reason why Dallas went 4-2-1 when their passing EPA was at least +6.0 points per game above average, 3-3 when it was between +0.6 and +6.0, and 0-4 when it was worse than that: If Prescott wasn\u2019t producing big efficiency numbers through the air, the Cowboys stood little chance of competing for wins. (And even then, sometimes they would still lose \u2014 or maybe just tie<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot of pressure to put on one unit, especially when Prescott has a mixed record of staying healthy for full seasons. Yes, he suited up for all 17 games in 2025, but the year before that he played just 8 games. Not to read too much into this, but in odd-numbered years since 2019, Dak has played 66 of a possible 67 games; in even-numbered years over that span, he\u2019s played just 25 of a possible 50 games.<\/p>\n

So in light of all this, why would I argue that Cowboy fans ought to actually feel better than expected about this upcoming season? Well, the good news in Dallas is that all of the things the Cowboys were historically bad (or even just mediocre) at in 2025 regress back to the mean between seasons much harder than the things they were good at.<\/p>\n

To illustrate this, let\u2019s look at 704 adjacent-season team pairs from 2003-04 through 2024-25, using a few measures comparing the year-to-year \u201cstickiness\u201d of a team\u2019s performance from one season to the following season:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

While no metric has especially great carryover from year to year \u2014 the NFL is notoriously unpredictable<\/a> \u2014 the single most persistent aspect in our data year-over-year for the typical team is its passing offense. (Intuitively, his makes sense: QB is usually the most important position on the field, and teams with continuity under center tend to retain more of their offensive performance from one season to the next.) Offense in general is nearly as consistent, with net EPA performance wedged between the two. (Again, not surprising, since passing offense drives so much of overall offensive performance.)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s much less predictive year-over-year? Defense \u2014 specifically passing defense \u2014 and rushing offense. In terms of share of next season\u2019s variance explained by the previous one, passing offense was nearly three times as predictive as passing defense!<\/p>\n

A consequence of this is that, when projecting the Cowboys\u2019 2026 performance, we must \u201cshrink\u201d their bad defense \u2014 an outlier in recent history \u2014 and their mediocre rushing offense back toward something less terrible than we need to pull Dak and the passing offense back toward the mean. Putting aside what Dallas did in their personnel moves \u2014 and who can even say there; NFL.com\u2019s Matt Okada gave their offseason an A- grade<\/a>, but ESPN\u2019s Seth Walder only gave them a C+<\/a> \u2014 the Cowboys simply gain through the mathematics of regression alone.<\/p>\n

Will that be enough for them to return to the playoffs? Maybe. My market-based forecast aggregator<\/a> has Dallas at 9.9 wins and a 52 percent chance to get in. And the (admittedly sparse) history of similarly all-offense\/no-defense teams offers further hope: Of the seven previous teams in my data who had an offense at least +4.0 EPA per game above average paired with a defense at least -7.0 points below it, six of them improved their net efficiency the following year, by an average of 3.8 EPA per game, while gaining 1.3 wins.<\/p>\n

And more than the usual hype, that\u2019s ultimately the strange case for believing in these Cowboys. They don\u2019t need the defense to suddenly become good, nor do they need Prescott to perfectly repeat one of his best seasons. (Though they do need him to stay intact.) What Dallas mostly needs is for the things that went catastrophically wrong in 2025 to become merely mediocre. After going an entire season without a single above-average game on both sides of the ball, even a handful of \u201ccomplete\u201d performances could make the Cowboys look dramatically different \u2014 and more relevant \u2014 in 2026.<\/p>\n

Filed under: NFL<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dak Prescott signals to CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys during the first quarter in the game against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":991501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2066],"tags":[230,229,257,2461,7,6],"class_list":["post-991500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas-cowboys","tag-cowboys","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-cowboys","tag-dallascowboys","tag-football","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117212027967705699","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=991500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/991501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=991500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=991500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=991500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}