The Cowboys head into Sunday night’s game against the Eagles with a winning record, but the gap between them and their NFC East rivals from Philadelphia is a sizable one.
The Eagles are three games up on Dallas heading into their first matchup of the year, which made it pretty easy for Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott to answer a question about whether or not he considered the game a must-win for his team.
“If we want to make a run at winning this division, giving ourselves a chance to play late into the season, it’s a game that we have to win,” Prescott said on Sirius XM NFL Radio.
Winning the division won’t be easy for the Cowboys even if they do beat the Eagles this weekend, but the realities of the NFC right now is that the team needs wins to challenge for a playoff spot of any kind. They are one of four 5-4 teams looking up at the Panthers and Seahawks in the race for Wild Card entering Week 11 and there are two teams at 4-5 that would like to muddy the waters even more.
That’s not an ideal spot for the Cowboys to find themselves with running back Ezekiel Elliott out of the lineup, linebacker Sean Lee likely to sit out and left tackle Tyron Smith’s status very much up in the air, but it is their spot all the same.