Dallas City News

It is all different on Sunday. There have been plenty of stressful moments this season for the Dallas Cowboys, and opportunities that we wanted to see them properly capitalize on. Ultimately they succeeded in certain instances and failed in others. This week against the Green Bay Packers though, there is no tomorrow if they happen to fail.

Playoff time means that the safety net is removed and the margin for error is gone. The Cowboys will not have to be perfect necessarily, but they will certainly have to play their very best football.

Most people seem to agree that Dallas will take care of business against the Green Bay Packers, but in the postseason tournament anything can happen. We have all lost a lot of sleep as a result of Cowboys teams that “should” have done various things.

How does the computer see this matchup unfolding? They are an impartial person we can ask/command to tell us. In an effort to understand things through as impartial of a lens as possible we ran a simulation in Madden 24 and the Cowboys won rather easily 23-3.

Please note that this simulation was run prior to Friday’s news or injury announcements.

Notable Madden statistics

• Dak Prescott: 17/27, 256 passing yards, 1 touchdown
• Tony Pollard: 13 carries, 39 yards, 1 touchdown
• Brandin Cooks: 7 receptions, 117 yards, 1 touchdown
• CeeDee Lamb: 2 receptions, 38 yards
• Micah Parsons, DeMarcus Lawrence and Malik Hooker each had a sack

The numbers may say that Dak Prescott only threw one touchdown, but it was quite impressive. Dak hit Brandin Cooks for a 52-yard score where Cooks even ran through traffic and broke some tackles at the end to take into the endzone.

Ideally Sunday’s result would be just like this. A boring game where Dallas was in control the entire time that led to absolutely zero stress from all of us. We are allowed to dream.

While this exercise can be fun it is not necessarily representative of exactly what is going to happen so you can probably let go of that idea. Madden is below .500 this season when predicting Cowboys games, hopefully this week it evens things up.

Madden predictions this season and game result:

• Week 1: Madden predicted Cowboys win 23-20, Cowboys won 40-0
• Week 2: Madden predicted Cowboys win 27-14, Cowboys won 30-10
• Week 3: Madden predicted Cowboys win 14-7, Cowboys lost 28-16
• Week 4: Madden predicted Cowboys win 41-14, Cowboys won 38-3
• Week 5: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 27-19, Cowboys lost 42-10
• Week 6: Madden predicted Cowboys lose, 21-17, Cowboys won 20-17
• Week 8: Madden predicted Cowboys lose, 30-27, Cowboys won 43-20
• Week 9: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 28-10, Cowboys lost 28-23
• Week 10: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 31-3, Cowboys won 49-17
• Week 11: Madden predicted Cowboys lose, 34-31, Dallas won 33-10
• Week 12: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 20-17, Dallas won 45-10
• Week 13: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 23-20, Dallas won 41-35
• Week 14: Madden predicted Cowboys lose, 23-20, Dallas won 33-13
• Week 15: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 28-3, Dallas lost 31-10
• Week 16: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 31-10, Dallas lost 22-20
• Week 17: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 17-13, Dallas won 20-19
• Week 18: Madden predicted Cowboys win, 32-31, Dallas won 38-10
• Overall Madden Accuracy so far this season: 8-9

We have been waiting almost an entire year for this moment. It is just about here.

Here we go.