NFC East Over/Unders 2024

Bryan Knowles: With the Hall of Fame Game on our rearview mirror, about 30 days left until actual, factual football starts once more, and the annual FTN Football Almanac already well-creased on our shelves, it’s time to start our annual look at the over/unders, putting our takes down on the record to be thoroughly and roundly mocked come January. 

Cale Clinton: This old FO favorite is making its FTN debut to kick off our preseason content rollout. While the Almanac is the essential, in-depth piece breaking down every minute detail of the 2024 season, these divisional previews are much tighter, more conversational, and a bit more fun. 

Bryan: And they provide room for us to bust out our hyperbole, biases, and wild guesses in ways we try to avoid when doing our actual, factual predictions in the book. If the FTN Almanac is the most-respected source for analytical analysis and thought, these preview pieces are the annoying little brother chiming in with jokes every 45 seconds while lurking in the background – a responsibility we take very seriously.

Cale: Speaking of annoying, we’re starting our divisional run-through with arguably one of the most frustrating divisions to pick. It’s been 20 years since the NFC East last had a back-to-back divisional winner. A division that constantly boasts conference Super Bowl favorites, the NFC East simultaneously finds a way to feature both improbable victories and mind-numbing collapses.

Bryan: “Frustrating” is a good word for the division. “Depressing” might be another. If we were setting out to find the division with the worst vibes, I’m not sure we could have done much better. The Cowboys seem forever destined to bomb out in the playoffs and do not have their franchise quarterback or wide receiver under contract going forward. The Eagles defense self-immolated in December. The Commanders are crawling their way out of decades of muck and despair. And the Giants are starting Daniel Jones at quarterback. Not a lot of happy fanbases around here!

Cale: But this is also a division chock-full of ways to claw out victory by hell or high water. The NFC East is home to two of the most improbable Super Bowl runs of the 21st century – what other division has Super Bowl MVPs as wonky as Nick Foles and Eli Manning? Even in more recent memory, a first-time starter Sam Howell was able to pull off a Week 18 upset to prevent Dallas from winning a division title, and Brian Daboll is just a couple years removed from churning out career seasons for the likes of Isaiah Hodgins and Richie James. The NFC East is football at its most extreme. It’s a beautiful, horrifying mess. 

Bryan: Well, we better start trying to clean it up, then. As always, we’re going to run the teams down from highest projected win total to lowest, which starts us with the presumptive favorites, the Dallas C … wait, what?

Philadelphia Eagles (10.5)

Bryan: Nothing like a nice, simple, uncontroversial and right-on-consensus projection to start us off, right? Ease into the whole prediction thing after a long offseason, don’t upset anyone. Easy preseason reps.

I am trying to picture the person who set these odds. They have the Eagles as division favorites with a double-digit over/under; tied for the third-highest in the league with teams like the Ravens. I can only imagine they left work at the end of November, went on a six-month vacation, and came back ready, refreshed, and with no awareness of how the season ended. To take a look at that 1-5 finish and first-round playoff exit, seeing the defense actively running around on fire and putting up a 23.6% defensive DVOA, second worst in the league from December onwards, and go yes, there are our division favorites? Well, it requires a level of optimism I think we should all aspire to in our everyday lives, but it’s probably not something I want to drop excessive amounts of cash on. 

Cale: Despite one of the worst second-half collapses in recent memory, I think I might be one of those Eagles optimists? You can’t hand-wave that kind of performance to simple injuries, but Philadelphia did finish bottom-five in defensive adjusted games lost due to injury and bottom-10 in overall AGL. This is a team that spent the offseason getting younger at a ton of important positions, whether it be the double-dip on rookie cornerbacks or the addition of do-it-all back Saquon Barkley. Even the biggest offseason losses (happy trails, Jason Kelce) had proteges waiting in the wings. The Eagles are refreshed and coming off a cataclysmic disaster of a second-half season. The full refresh at both coordinators, coupled with a youth movement, might do some good for Philadelphia. 

Bryan: To be clear, I’m not saying the Eagles are a bad football team, nor am I predicting the defense to be as bad in 2024 as they were in December. Professional football teams can’t be as bad as the Eagles were in December; that 23.6% DVOA would have been the third worst in history if they managed to do that for a full season. Vic Fangio is not a magical cure-all, and his Year 1 track record isn’t spectacular, but compared to the Sean Desai/Matt Patricia combo from a year ago, he’s an unimpeachable genius. The cornerback room should be significantly improved and be good once more with the combination of better health and first-round pick Quinyon Mitchell, and the return of Chauncy Gardner-Johnson should help, too. I’m not expecting to see the coverage looking like the Keystone Cops out there, with the missed tackles that made the playoff loss to the Buccaneers a lowlight reel for the ages. But Fangio defenses have historically been reliant on great off-ball linebacker play – going back to the Dome Patrol in New Orleans, or Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman in San Francisco, or Roquan Smith in Chicago. The Eagles are institutionally allergic to good linebacker play, and I don’t see Fangio’s magic pixie dust fixing Devin White or Nakobe Dean in one year.

I do think that the Eagles can still wrench things to a winning record, because their offense is just that good. I’m a little down on Jalen Hurts compared to the general consensus – or at least on the NFL 100, where he’s above Dak Prescott and C.J. Stroud – but I do expect him to bounce back a little after a slightly more middling season. The offensive line will probably take a little step back with Jason Kelce retiring, but the Eagles already had their succession plan in place. I’m excited to see what Saquon Barkley does behind an offensive line that understands basic blocking assignments. And, of course, there may not be a better 1-2 punch at wideout than A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith.

Cale: Getting Brown and Smith locked up to long-term extensions is going to silence a lot of the back-and-forth that started to bubble up at the most frustrating points of last year’s season. The line loses Kelce but retains Lane Johnson, Landon Dickerson, and Jordan Mailata on some solid deals. Plus, Kelce hand-picked Jurgens during the draft process a few years back. That is a level of stability the Eagles need to have success in 2024. Kelce’s loss is arguably understated just because of how much he impacts the success of the Tush Push, but this is the perfect line for Hurts and Barkley to both thrive behind. Even without Kelce, this has to be the best starting five Barkley has ever run behind as a professional. 

I am also admittedly a lot more excited about the defensive chances of this Eagles team. Devin White is a solid reclamation project for Philadelphia to replace their linebacker turnover from the 2023 offseason. The Mitchell and DeJean additions, coupled with the return of Gardner-Johnson, make this one of the deeper secondaries in the league. The turnover on the defensive line scares me, but I’m bullish on Bryce Huff in a more prominent starting role. I can see him making a massive impact with Jalen Carter alongside him. 

Bryan: I don’t know. I just think the defense is a lead weight wrapped around their ankles; one that even the return of Big Dom to the sidelines can’t offset. The Eagles read to me as average on the whole, and I think even in a weaker NFC, ‘average’ is not going to cut it when it comes to the postseason, much less double-digit wins. For them to go over, they’re going to need to have a winning record on their extended road trip in the first half of the season; from Week 3 to Week 8, they play four out of five games on the road, with a bye week and a home game against Cleveland breaking it up. There’s a world where they’re sitting 2-5 at the end of October, Nick Sirianni’s seat is on fire, and there are questions about whether they’ll even finish second in the division. That seems more likely than double-digit wins, and 11-6? It’s not impossible, but this is an easy under for me.

Cale: Thatline is a bit steep, but I’m still going to take the over. Part of that is influenced by how I view the rest of the NFC East (more on that later), but I genuinely have some faith in the Eagles this year. I see Philadelphia as a team who has a lot to teach their new players, whether they are fresh to the roster or slotting into starting roles. That’s never an easy task. This team, however, does have the top-end talent to keep itself in games against contenders while the rest of these folks acclimate. I could even see the team having a bit of a reverse to last year’s collapse, tearing through the back half of their schedule. If they can hold their own in the first half of the year, hover around .500 exiting October, then they are in prime position to avenge last year’s December Disaster.

Dallas Cowboys (9.5)

Bryan: Is it premature to jump the gun and just ask which round of the playoffs the Cowboys will be eliminated in this year? Because they have most of the pieces you would expect from a contending team, but I find I have absolutely no faith in those pieces working together come January.

If that question sounds familiar, by the by, it’s because I opened our piece in 2022 asking the same question, and I would have done it again in 2023. This Cowboys team has been in a holding pattern of ‘good enough to win the division’ for years, and then they get into the postseason and smash face-first into reality. All in to finding new and exciting ways to bomb out.

Cale: What, you’re going to tell me a team that lost a ton of depth and only added two running backs and an off-ball linebacker in free agency don’t look poised to make a deep January run? No one loss from the Cowboys’ offseason is going to really bury them, but the cumulative churn of this past offseason has stripped Dallas of a ton of depth along the offensive line and defensive line, two key areas imperative to Dallas’ ability to make a deep run.

Bryan: That’s a January problem, though, and we’re talking about the regular season. Dallas has an above-average offense and a very good defense, and it’s honestly possible I’m underselling both. What’s stopping me from calling the offense outright ‘good’ is questions about the running game. Ezekiel Elliott as your lead back? In 2024? That’s a terrifying prospect. And while Dallas is going with this as a committee, the other members of said committee are Rico Dowdle and Deuce Vaughn. The offensive line ahead of them also has more question marks than you usually expect from a Cowboys team, with Tyron Smith and Tyler Biadasz gone, though I imagine they’ll be at least passable.

But how bad can an offense be with Dak Prescott? A passing DVOA of at least 14.0% in four of the last five years; basically, always in the top five in DYAR when healthy. That’s your franchise quarterback; someone you lock up for years and pay huge amounts of money to keep around. Explaining Jerry Jones’ hesitation to sign Prescott or CeeDee Lamb or his other big-ticket items is, as always, left as an exercise for the reader.

Cale: How about explaining Jones’ hesitation to many any significant moves this offseason? After letting Tony Pollard walk, the running back room is in dire straits despite being the only place the Cowboys added talent this offseason. This receiving corps is CeeDee Lamb, a 31-yard-old Brandin Cooks coming off his fourth straight season of total yardage decline, and a handful of question marks. Dak Prescott is in a contract year with a thin offensive line, a new center, and a new starting left tackle. Any big-name addition to this offense – especially in the passing game – would make me a whole lot more confident in the Cowboys’ prospects this year. 

Those defensive losses feel more replaceable for Dallas. Kendricks slots right into the spot left over by Leighton Vander Esch. Trevon Diggs returns to take Stephon Gilmore’s reps. Any defense with Micah Parsons and DeMarcus Lawrence bookending it is going to be a solid defense. 

Bryan: The defense may be a little soft up the middle, but the pass rush and secondary are both top notch. Is there a better set of edge rushers and cornerbacks anywhere in the league? Maybe Cleveland? Welcome to the NFL, Jayden Daniels; I hope you enjoy your visit to Dallas.

You can find this prop as high as 10.5 in some places. Don’t do that! That’s too high; take the extra win, even at the lower odds.Even as it stands, I’ll be biting my nails all the way through the bye; Ravens, @Giants, @Steelers, Lions is not a fun way to roll into your bye week! But as long as they can reach the bye with a winning record, I think they’ll win the NFC East and be in contention for the bye weeks. Over, and I look forward to how things go wrong in the Divisional Round this year.

Cale: Honestly, even at that lower 9.5 line, I still don’t love the current setup in Dallas. Our Almanac data thinks the Cowboys schedule is one of the easiest in the league, but there are just too many games that give me pause. Road trips to Cleveland, San Francisco, and a revamped Atlanta team. Home games against C.J. Stroud and Joe Burrow. Dallas finished last year 5-1 in divisional matchups, but nothing is guaranteed in the NFC East. Even a successful Cowboys season feels full of close games and skin-of-their-teeth escapes. With how thin this roster is, an injury derails that quickly. I take no pleasure in taking the under on the Cowboys, especially if you find the higher prop totals. 

New York Giants (6.5)

Bryan: There were three teams that saw their offensive DVOA jump at least 20 percentage points in the second half of the 2023 season. One was the Los Angeles Rams, who got healthy and went on a run. One was the Green Bay Packers, who saw Jordan Love possibly take the leap. And the third was the New York Giants who … well, when you’re at a -33.1% DVOA to start the season, there’s really nowhere to go but up.

Cale: For pure entertainment purposes, there was no better team to throw on the first-ever offseason Hard Knocks than the New York Giants. Watching this team sweat the Daniel Jones contract aftermath, rationalize letting a franchise player like Saquon Barkley walk, fall in love with quarterbacks they had no ability to go get, it was like watching a small identity crisis unfold in real time. It almost felt fitting that the team accidentally leaked their draft big board and color-coding scheme in the final weeks of the show. After months of telling the world “This is who we want to be, and this is who we are right now,” they cap it off by really spilling the beans in a massive way. Given the tags, that Maye-Harrison-Alt run at picks 3-5 had to be gut-wrenching for New York.

Bryan: Forget the over/under for a moment. The more pressing question for the Giants is whether or not there’s a more depressing, hopeless team to be a fan of right now. It’s been three years since Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll took over, and has there been any signs of life, anywhere? Anything that makes you go “yes, I enjoy rooting for the New York Giants. This has been a good use of my time.” The other terrible teams in the league have hope and promise – maybe rookie quarterback du jour will actually be good this year, or a new coach can breathe life into a flatlined squad from a year ago. With New York…

Cale: It is worth noting that those Giants teams that won two Super Bowls earlier this century had zero expectations coming into either championship season. Maybe the Maras have a model we just haven’t seen click yet. Hover around the middle of the pack for long enough to see if the chips roll your way? The goofier the quarterback, the better? 

Bryan: Alright, let me give this a shot, and try to find some positivity. I think the Giants’ pass rush might hit the lofty heights of ‘above average’; Brian Burns is a very good player who New York got for a proverbial song, and that takes pressure off of Kayvon Thibodeaux and Azeez Ojulari and so on and so forth. Dexter Lawrence may be the best defensive tackle in football now that Aaron Donald has retired. Malik Nabors is theoretically, potentially exciting, though everyone has a rookie to get excited about. After that, the pickings get awfully slim.

For the moment, let’s just stipulate that Nabors is an immediate superstar and passes Marvin Harrison and company to be the best rookie wide receiver in the game. Even given that, the Giants might still have the worst offense in the league. Overpaying Daniel Jones is a specter that still haunts the franchise, with no signs yet that Daboll can use whatever magic beans he used to turn Josh Allen around to make something out of him. The running back room is certainly cheaper post-Saquon Barkley, but I have a hard time getting excited over a Devin Singletary/Tyrone Tracy backfield. The offensive line is a mess, the rest of the receiving room is a joke… if we’re looking for a spot where something unexpected could happen that would propel the Giants into contendership, I’m not finding it.

Cale: Again, in an odd way, New York has always done a little better with no-name talent on the field. I’ll never forget that first season of Daboll’s Giants tenure, where he turned Darius Slayton and Richie James into top-20 receivers. Isaiah Hodgins would have joined them if he qualified for DVOA rankings. Daboll can work some magic, scheming players into space and using their speed to generate additional yardage. Do I think that will work as well with any of Wan’Dale Robinson, Isaiah McKenzie, Allen Robinson, and Jalin Hyatt? Probably not, but Nabers and Slayton should be able to out-perform their perceived value.

There are still too many holes on this team. Bryan already hit on the offensive line and the running back room. This defense is a real odd hodge-podge of talent. Kayvon Thibodeaux and Brian Burns are an electric pairing as edges book-ending Dexter Lawrence, but beyond the line the only player of note is, who, Bobby Okereke? Deonte Banks is still a work in progress but will have to take the mantle on a young, inexperienced secondary. Quarterbacks in a quick-passing offense could have a field day against the Giants. There are just too many holes in this team to do anything meaningful. I could see the Giants maybe spoiling a game or two, but this is going to be a slog of a year for New York. I’d hammer the under here and hope New York puts themselves in a position to get Nabers a proper QB next year. 

Bryan: Maybe the Giants can build some momentum going into their bye week – home against a Philadelphia team I’m down on and a Washington team with a rookie quarterback; on the road against PIttsburgh and Carolina teams trying to find their own way. Maybe they can get to .500 by the bye, and piece together something at the end to scrap their way to 7-10. I just can’t see it. Under.

Washington Commanders (6.5)

Bryan: While I’m not convinced Washington will be any better than New York this year, the feeling of being a Commanders fan has to be leaps and bounds ahead of being a Giants fan at the moment. When was the last time we could say that? The very brief moment when RGIII looked like he would be the next big thing? The buzz around Joe Gibbs returning the NFL in the mid-2000s? It’s not been a good century for Washington fans, but that may be changing.

Cale: Imagine Commanders fans having anything to be hopeful about? All it took was for Dan Snyder to sell the team, and all of a sudden that decrepit house of horrors known as FedEx Field has a different feel to it. It’s the football equivalent of exorcizing an evil spirit. 

Bryan: New ownership last year was mostly a vibes thing more than anything else, with it being a runback year for the dregs of the Snyder era. But now, Washington’s got a new coach, a new offensive playcaller, and a new quarterback, and I like exactly one of those things. That is still positive forward momentum! Baby steps, right?

I know the book on Jayden Daniels is basically one year – but it’s a year where he put up crazy video game numbers, completing over 70% of his passes for north of 11 yards attempt while also scrambling around all over the place at a highly productive rate. That’s a good book! I’m worried about his size and his willingness to take hits, but if Anthony Richardson can make scouts go gaga in between getting folded in half like a sheet of paper, we should be having the same sort of excitement about Daniels. Aggressive in the passing game, a threat with the ball in his hands? I’m in. He was my QB2 from basically the start of the draft, and I was happy to see Washington take him over Drake Maye. The idea of Daniels and Terry McLaurin hooking up downfield repeatedly sounds good to me.

Cale: I’m a bit lower on Daniels relative to the class, but that was more a love for Maye than a distaste for Daniels. The former LSU quarterback also landed in a real solid spot in terms of supporting cast. He doesn’t have the depth of talent that a Caleb Williams has, nor was he lucky enough to end up throwing balls to Justin Jefferson like J.J. McCarthy, but Daniels gets a strong top receiver in Terry McLaurin, a young upside play in Luke McCaffrey, and a passing game security blanket in Austin Ekeler. Will it all manifest into immediate 2024 success? Absolutely not, but it’s a good setup to break in a project quarterback. As long as they don’t try to rival last year’s franchise record for sacks allowed, Daniels is going to have a great environment to grow in. 

Bryan: I’m going to step a little bit back from the ledge here, because I don’t think Washington is actually a good football team; not this year. They have the lowest DVOA projection entering the season – 31st on offense, 25th on defense. That’s justified. Dan Quinn is the shadow version of Daniels in terms of generating excitement and hype; a retread defensive coach. Yes, his defenses in Dallas were creative and exciting, but they’re also more talent-dependent than scheme-dependent, and the Washington defensive cupboard is rather bare. Kliff Kingsbury comes in to call the offense, and he was last seen buying a one-way ticket to southeast Asia after driving the Cardinals straight into and then through the ground. Outside of McLaurin, the established, reliable talent on Washington is … who? Sam Cosmi? Bobby Wagner and Frankie Luvu as your off-ball linebackers? The fading corpses of fantasy stars of yesteryear in Zach Ertz and Austin Ekeler? The smoldering wreckage of what used to be the best defensive line in football? I entirely get why the projection is so bad.

Cale: Yeah, this defense especially gets me really nervous. After cutting their losses on retaining any of their quality edge talent, the Commanders spent the offseason trying to replace their impact in the aggregate by first-round flame-out Clelin Ferrell, a 30-year-old Dante Fowler Jr., and Dorance Armstrong. None of those players are Chase Young or Montez Sweat, let alone both of them. The secondary is still abysmal. Even with the adds in free agency and through the draft, this is a yearslong overhaul for one of the worst units in the league. The overhaul of the team’s off-ball linebacker situation is…interesting? Bobby Wagner is going to churn out 100 tackles until he physically can’t, and Frankie Luvu was one of the unsung gems of the Panthers defense, but why make this massive overhaul at off-ball linebacker when there are such glaring issues at much more impactful positions. 

None of this gives me the confidence to go over. I love the path that the Commanders are on. Washington fans may look back at this past draft one day as a major pivot point for the franchise. That isn’t going to change overnight, though. Washington still has massive holes all over both sides of the ball. That is not the situation that a rookie quarterback thrives in, especially one as raw as Daniels. Again, like New York, I see Washington giving a good team absolute hell once or twice this season. It just isn’t going to be enough to save them from going under. 

Bryan: And yet … I can’t help but be a little optimistic. In this case, it’s that Washington will be regular bad and not historically bad, but every little step forward helps. The Commanders have the fourth-easiest schedule by our numbers, and that brings with it opportunities to inflate their win total. I imagine things will start rough, but come mid-October, things begin to open up nicely. There’s a Panthers/Bears/Giants/Steelers stretch in there, with three of those games at home, where I could imagine Washington running the table. That already gets you two thirds of the way to a 6.5-win line. Maybe I’m overly buying into the Daniels buzz, or maybe I’m just desperate for some optimism after wading my way through the rest of the division. But I’m taking the over here, even if that just means 7-10 and a season of learning lessons overall.