The Cowboys should be a healthier team in 2025.
Football is a game of attrition, and every team must deal with injuries over the course of a season. But you need some extra bad mojo to get hit the way the Cowboys got hit with injuries last year.
Every year, Football Outsiders used to publish their statistical study of team health from the previous NFL season, and Aaron Schatz has carried on that tradition at his new site, FTNFantasy.com. For 2024, Schatz determined that the Cowboys were one of the teams hit harder by the injury bug, especially on defense, at least according to their metric called Adjusted Games Lost (AGL). In their own words:
Adjusted games lost doesn’t just add up total injuries. It accounts for both absent players and those playing at less than 100%, and it specifically measures injuries to expected starters and important situational players rather than little-used backups. As such, AGL estimates the impact of injuries on teams and provides a comparable total that often succinctly explains why teams improved or declined from one year to the next.
