The Dallas Cowboys are so bad the Eagles should almost feel sorry for them ... almost. Blame Jerry Jones.

How ‘bout them Cowboys, indeed.

Jimmy Johnson’s postgame cockcrow in the visiting locker room at San Francisco after the 1992 NFC championship game launched a mini-dynasty that turned the team once known as much for its cheerleaders as for its championships into “America’s Team” again. That dynasty ended four years later.

“America’s Team” has won just five playoff games since Tiger Woods turned pro in 1996.

They haven’t won more than one playoff game in any postseason, but they’ve lost 13, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be winning another any time soon. Things are so bleak in Big D that the $240 million quarterback’s torn right hamstring isn’t nearly the franchise’s biggest source of pain.

After being picked by many pundits to win the NFC East, the Cowboys are 3-5. Dak Prescott won’t play again for more than a month. The defense is as weak as tea from a twice-used tea bag.

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Before the season, Sunday’s game in Dallas was supposed to be a referendum contest for the Eagles. Now, it’s a must-win for the Cowboys, who, despite a recent 6-0 home record against the Eagles, have almost no chance of winning; the Eagles are 6-2 and on a four-game winning streak. As delicious as this circumstance is for Eagles fans and lots of others, it’s appropriate to address the question:

How did this happen? Let’s start at the top.

The Cowboys are 3-5 because Jerry Jones, the Cowboys’ bombastic owner, president, and GM, has made a series of enormous mistakes over the past five seasons.

Jones hired failed Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy in 2020. To be fair, the rest of the field hasn’t proved to be much better. Predictably, McCarthy has been a postseason disaster. In the three seasons prior to this year, he won 36 regular-season games but only one playoff game.

While Jones can’t be faulted too much for hiring McCarthy, he certainly can be blamed for retaining him after the 12-5 Cowboys’ two-touchdown home wild-card loss to the Packers in January. Jones could have fired McCarthy then, and promoted defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, whom the lowly Commanders poached. Washington is no longer lowly; it leads the NFC East at 7-2.

Similarly, Jones fired offensive coordinator Kellen Moore after the 2022 season, scapegoating his former Golden Boy instead of laying blame at McCarthy’s feet, where it belonged. In 2022, the Cowboys ranked fourth in points per game, even though Prescott missed five games with a fractured thumb. Moore landed with the Los Angeles Chargers and managed to guide the offense to respectability despite injuries to quarterback Justin Herbert and receiver Mike Williams. However, after the Chargers fired their head coach and general manager in December of 2023, Moore did not survive the hiring of Jim Harbaugh, and the Eagles eagerly pounced.

All of which is to say, two years ago, Jones chose to blame Moore instead of McCarthy. Moore’s Eagles offense averages more points and yards per game than the Cowboys.

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One main reason: Jones has mismanaged the Cowboys’ salary cap situation so badly that he couldn’t afford Derrick Henry, who wanted to play in Dallas. Jones recently said Henry wouldn’t have been a scheme fit, anyway.

“I don’t know if he’d be having a career year in our situation. … We don’t run that type of offense at all,” Jones told 105.3 FM in Dallas.

Henry, 30, had made four of the five previous Pro Bowls. He landed with the Baltimore Ravens, where he currently leads the league in rushing yards (1,120), rushing touchdowns (12), total touchdowns (14), and has the longest TD run of the season (87 yards). That fits in any offense.

Instead, Jones gave Ezekiel Elliott a one-year, $3 million deal. The money has been wasted. Elliott reportedly has been chronically late to team meetings all season and, after completely missing a third team meeting last Friday, was not allowed to travel with the team as it lost in Atlanta. He’ll be back Sunday, though.

The availability of the team’s best player wasn’t as certain until Friday.

CeeDee Lamb suffered a shoulder injury last Sunday and was limited in practice all week, but McCarthy said Friday that Lamb will play. That’s big news, of course, considering Lamb was the league’s best receiver last season … and the biggest distraction before this season.

Lamb held out all of training camp before Jones, inevitably, capitulated, and signed him to a four-year, $136 million contract. The damage was done. Lamb averaged almost eight catches and more than 102 yards per game in 2023. Clearly out of sync with the offense, Lamb averaged fewer than five catches and fewer than 73 yards per game in the Cowboys’ first three games this season. They went 1-2.

Fiscal issues also hamstrung the Cowboys’ efforts to build an offensive line. They rank 27th in pass blocking and 22nd in run blocking, according to Pro Football Focus. For a team that knew it would be reliant on its offense to win, neglecting the line was probably Jones’ biggest mistake.

As for the defense, well, depth and injury have sabotaged what was expected to be a flawed but dynamic unit.

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Four-time Pro Bowl defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence, 32, was superb in the first four games of the season but has missed the last four games with a foot sprain and won’t play Sunday. Micah Parsons, the former Penn State star who led all linebackers with 40½ sacks from 2021-23, had one sack in 2024 before an ankle sprain cost him the last four games. Third-year cornerback DaRon Bland, whose 14 interceptions from 2022-23 led all players and who returned five of his nine in 2023 for touchdowns — a single-season record he reached by Thanksgiving Day — broke a foot in training camp and has yet to play a game this season.

Fifth-year cornerback Trevon Diggs, who tore an ACL two games into the 2023 season, has not regained the form that sent him to the Pro Bowl after the 2021 and 2022 seasons. And now he’s playing with a partially torn calf.

The Cowboys’ defense ranks 26th in total yards and 30th against the run. The Eagles are the NFL’s No. 2 rushing offense. Sunday afternoon, they should have Jerry’s boys on the run.

Tune into Gameday Central on Sunday as Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith discuss all the key questions surrounding the Eagles’ matchup with the Dallas Cowboys.