One Step At A Time. First, It’s Time for the Eagles to Focus on Winning the NFC East.
It’s been fourty-five years since Eagles Head Coach Dick Vermeil walked into a hotel room in Dallas and repeated a question that he had been asking his football team since his arrival in 1976 in Philly, “What was it going to take to beat the Dallas Cowboys?”
The Eagles had never beaten Dallas in Texas Stadium until November 1979. And now it’s been seven years since the Eagles won a game in Texas Stadium and this team is trying to ascend to be one of the best in the NFC. The Cowboys may be without star wide receiver CeeDee Lamb and will be without Dak Prescott for at least four weeks. The listless Giants appear on the brink of surrender, and Jayden Daniels may be a generational quarterback, but his surrounding Washington team isn’t on the same level as the Eagles.
Everyone in Philly marks their calendars when it’s Cowboys week. And when the Eagles are 6–2 and the Cowboys are a wounded 3–5, the vultures are out.
Beating Dallas is satisfying anytime, but when moving from good to NFC elite at the same time is well — satisfying.
The Eagles did beat the Cowboys on that Monday night in Dallas — 31–21 thanks in part to a Tony Franklin 59-yard field goal. You also may guess that that win would help to surge a momentum that would propel the Eagles to an NFC Championship Game win against those Cowboys 20–6 one year later at Veteran’s Stadium in South Philly.
During that team meeting in a Dallas hotel would be the first time that Dick Vermeil would answer the question that he had been repeating to his football team for four years before spinning around and walking out of the room, “What’s it going to take to beat the Dallas Cowboys? Just another twenty-four hours.”
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