Should Cowboys fans be worried by 0-4 preseason? Not according to the records

You hear it all of the time. NFL preseason games don’t mean squat.

That’s true, for the most part, especially if you’re talking about wins and losses. The final score just doesn’t matter much.

But does the Dallas Cowboys’ 0-4 preseason have you at all concerned about what the 2018 regular season holds?

Not necessarily. The last time the Cowboys went 0-4 in the preseason they went 12-4 and reached the divisional playoffs in 2014. In 2016, the Cowboys went 1-3 in the preseason and followed it with a 13-3 record.

“Obviously, you have a lot of different objectives going into each of the games,” Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said after Thursday’s 14-6 loss. “It starts with the playing time of your guys. You’re looking at different people. Certainly you want to win every time you go out there, we’re competing to win, but that doesn’t override some of the other objectives that we have.”

Dallas has gone winless in the preseason five times since the NFL went to a 16-game regular season in 1978. After going 0-5 in 1986, the Cowboys, at the beginning of the end of the Tom Landry era, went 7-9. But they went 0-5 in 1998 and finished 10-6, so make of that which you will.

The last time Dallas had an undefeated preseason, 2006, they were 3-0-1. The Cowboys went 9-7 and lost the wild card in head coach Bill Parcells’ final season.

The only time the Cowboys have finished with a perfect preseason record (4-0 in 1985), they finished 10-6 and lost in the divisional round of the playoffs. They missed the playoffs the next five seasons.

And all those dominant 90s teams? The never had a winning preseason record. Jimmy Johnson’s first season in 1989 they went 3-1 in preseason before going 1-15.

Winning preseason games, of course, is not the main objective. That’s obvious by the number of starters on the sideline. The Cowboys didn’t have one starter (excluding rookie Michael Gallup, who may earn a starting job) play a snap on Thursday.

“Obviously, if we wanted to win this game the number of guys that didn’t play would have played,” Garrett said. “You have a plan for your personnel. You want to see different guys do different things. At the end of it, you absolutely want to win. We did get a chance to see a lot of our players and I thought we got better as a team over the course of the four games.”

Preseason prognostication

A look at the Cowboys’ preseason history and their ensuing regular-season record:

This story was originally published August 30, 2018 at 11:50 PM.