Dallas Cowboys Week 3 Madden simulation projects closer than anticipated win over Arizona Cardinals

Madden thinks the Cowboys are in store for a tight one on Sunday.

Two games in it is fair to say that nothing about this Dallas Cowboys season has gone how we envisioned it. Sure, we anticipated the team being good in our most optimistic projections, but nobody thought that they would have outscored the New York Giants and New York Jets by a combined score of 70-10 over the first two weeks.

Football is unpredictable, as is basically everything, which means that we can have all sorts of thoughts and ideas about what is going to happen and then be completely surprised by the actual results. Thankfully for us we can take a step towards figuring out the potential truth with the help of modern technology. I, of course, am talking about video games.

In case you did not know, every week we run a simulation for the upcoming Dallas Cowboys game through Madden 24. This is something that we have been doing for a few years now mostly in good fun, but once or twice the game has nailed things even down to the score.

I’d imagine people would be upset if that were the case this week. Madden sees the Cowboys winning, but only 14-7. You can watch the entire simulation right here.

Notable statistics from Madden’s Cowboys/Cardinals simulation:

• Dak Prescott: 15/26, 134 passing yards, one passing touchdown
• Tony Pollard: 13 carries, 139 yards, one rushing touchdown
• Micah Parsons: one sack
• Osa Odighizuwa: one sack
• Malik Hooker: one sack, one interception

Madden predictions this season and game result:

• Week 1: Madden predicted Cowboys win 23-20, Cowboys won 40-0
• Week 2: Madden predicted Cowboys win 27-14, Cowboys won 30-10

We removed Trevon Diggs from the Cowboys roster for the simulation. It was painful, but the purpose is to get as close of a simulation to the potential outcome which means we have to have the rosters completely accurate. Like it is expected the Cowboys will do, we kicked DaRon Bland to the outside and had Jourdan Lewis start in the slot.

As you can see, Tony Pollard had a really productive day which we would all love to see, but if the Cowboys “only” put up 14 points it would likely cause a bit of concern, even if they wound up winning in the process.