PHILADELPHIA − What a start to the 2025 NFL season.
Thursday night's meeting between the reigning Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles and the NFC East rival Dallas Cowboys at Lincoln Financial field included the unveiling of a championship banner, ejection of a Pro Bowler for spitting before the first play from scrimmage and a weather delay of more than an hour that pushed the final result into Friday morning. It didn't include one of the league's biggest stars, the Cowboys star stripped from Micah Parsons after he was shockingly traded to the Green Bay Packers last week.
As for that aforementioned result? The Eagles prevailed 24-20 in what morphed into a surprisingly tight result, Philadelphia entering the game favored by more than a touchdown.
It's merely the first of the league's 272 regular-season games. But one this unique and anticipated deserves its own breakdown of winners and losers, so here we go:
Despite quarterbacking two of the league's most prominent teams, this duo has largely been out of the headlines in recent months. Hurts, by nature, is a say less, do more kind of guy − and the Super Bowl 59 MVP delivered plenty, efficient through the air while running for a pair of scores. The summer's Parsons saga in Dallas largely overshadowed Prescott's return from a serious hamstring injury that cost him the final nine games of the 2024 season. But he appeared comfortably in command of a Dallas offense that had little trouble moving the ball on a Philly defense that ranked as the league's best in 2024 ... albeit with DT Jalen Carter on the field (more on him later). And while you could ding Prescott for failing to come up with a key sequence in the fourth quarter, the guys who are supposed to be making plays for him ... didn't. It's just one game obviously, but always a good sign when your passer is in postseason-adjacent form in Week 1.
