Overreaction is just as much a part of the experience of watching football as wings, beer, and screaming curses at the television, so it’s hard to remind oneself at times against counting a given team out of the race in September, no matter how badly they’ve performed (see: the Cowboys this season thus far).
Even at 0-2, it would be foolish for Cowboys fans to call it a season. After all, as you may remember, the New York Giants started 0-2 in 2007, only to get their [stuff] together, earn an unlikely playoff berth and win the Super Bowl over a heavily favored Patriots team.
If the Cowboys slip to 0-3, packing it in and calling it a season, statistically anyway, wouldn’t be quite so egregious. Since 1990, 102 teams have started 0-3. Only three of these teams have made the playoffs--that's 2.9 percent. In an interesting twist, the last team to have pulled off this feat was Wade Phillips’ 2003 Buffalo Bills.
So can Sunday’s game in Houston be classified as a “must-win”?
Unless Phillips has another odds-defying run in him, yeah, it kind of is.
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