The Dallas Cowboys have been very bad this season. While the Cowboys have turned things around as of late with four wins in their last five contests, the ultimate reality is that the 2024 season was a terrible one for them. Ending (seemingly) on a high is nice, but the lowest point was among the most treacherous ever experienced in franchise history.
Rewinding the clock back to the start of the 2024 campaign runs in lockstep with that as the Cowboys were notoriously chill during free agency and dragged their feet for the most important extensions that they needed to get done relative to their own team. Consider that they didn’t even get one done with Micah Parsons despite him being eligible.
This is all relevant for this discussion because as we are in the penultimate week of the regular season, comparing the current moment of the Cowboys to that of last year, it seems a bit obvious that they were a bit less desired by more than just their own fans.
Top television broadcasts did not seem to want the Cowboys as much this season
All told that crew called nine Cowboys games last season, including the playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers. The Cowboys were far and away the team who FOX, the network who carries the bulk of big NFC games, had across last season.
But FOX is just one network. While they have a number one crew (Tom Brady replaced Greg Olsen on it this year) so do CBS, NBC, ESPN and Amazon Prime. Obviously NBC and Prime only do one game a week and ESPN generally only has one, but nevertheless you get the point.
Across all of the 2023 season, a campaign in which the Cowboys experienced a lot of team and individual success, Dallas had a game called by a number one crew 17 of 18 times.
2023 Dallas Cowboys games called by the top broadcast crew of a specific network
- Week 1: NBC
- Week 2: CBS
- Week 3: N/A
- Week 4: FOX
- Week 5: NBC
- Week 6: ESPN
- Week 7: BYE
- Week 8: FOX
- Week 9: FOX
- Week 10: FOX
- Week 11: FOX
- Week 12: CBS
- Week 13: Amazon
- Week 14: NBC
- Week 15: FOX
- Week 16: FOX
- Week 17: ESPN
- Week 18: FOX
- Wild Card Round: FOX
None of this is meant to sound like a flex or a brag. The Dallas Cowboys are the Dallas Cowboys so a lot of their magnitude has to do with being themselves. They are the most valuable professional sports franchise in the world and someone who everyone wants a piece of. We did not include Netflix in the list of broadcast options, but they obviously just had two Christmas Day games and while the Cowboys were not a part of either they do have a brand new series coming out on the service in 2025.
As we look at this season, while the Cowboys have been incredibly popular they have not been as in-demand by top broadcast crews as they were last season. We noted how we are in the penultimate game of the season and Dallas has already had a non-number one crew four times, including this week against the Philadelphia Eagles.
2024 Dallas Cowboys games called by the top broadcast crew of a specific network
- Week 1: FOX
- Week 2: FOX
- Week 3: FOX
- Week 4: Amazon Prime
- Week 5: NBC
- Week 6: FOX
- Week 7: BYE
- Week 8: NBC
- Week 9: N/A
- Week 10: CBS
- Week 11: ESPN
- Week 12: N/A
- Week 13: FOX
- Week 14: ESPN
- Week 15: N/A
- Week 16: NBC
- Week 17: N/A
It feels very safe to assume that Dallas will not draw a top network’s crew in Week 18 which will mean that 5 of their 17 games this season are called by at best a secondary crews. That is five compared to just a single instance last year.
Perhaps the best way to really prove the point here is to circle back to our discussion about FOX. You see, FOX and CBS are the only networks that have multiple crews although as noted we sometimes get a second ESPN crew for Monday night doubleheaders.
During last year’s run through the holidays Greg Olsen (then the color analyst for FOX’s top crew) even joked about how their crew at large was the unofficial broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys. This was true because it made continual sense for FOX to choose to send that crew to work Cowboys games because the Cowboys were playing so well.
The last time this season in which Dallas had FOX’s top crew (which again this year has Tom Brady in for Olsen) was on Thanksgiving Day against the New York Giants. While this counts in a technical sense, FOX and CBS each have one Thanksgiving game every year and alternate between Dallas and Detroit. There is no choosing to send a crew. It’s just a matter of what year it is and whether they are working the Cowboys or Lions game.
This means that the last time FOX chose to send their number one crew to work a Cowboys game was back in Week 6 when Dallas hosted the Detroit Lions. You will recall that debacle as the one that unfolded in front of Jerry Jones on his birthday.
Look at the schedule in the image we have presented here. You can see the broadcast partners of each game and while there are several FOX logos, the point again that we are focusing on is that the network has had four opportunities now (counting this week) to choose to send their top crew to work the Cowboys game and hasn’t. That is pretty representative of where the Cowboys are these days.
I realize that saying people care less about the Cowboys is hardly shocking given that the Cowboys have been so bad this season. And obviously the Cowboys were just flexed back this week from the late afternoon window to the early one. It is grim in that sense.
More often than not television networks will do anything and everything they can to put the Cowboys on television to pick up an audience. The overall point here is that one network, FOX in this case, has outright chosen not to do so as the season has worn on. On some level, the Dallas Cowboys have become boring.