The Dallas Cowboys opened the 2012 NFL season with a notable performance on national television and closed it with another one. Each game—the opener with the Giants and the finale with the Redskins, each in prime-time—showed the wide pendulum that this team’s fortunes can swing.
Somewhere along the line the Dallas Cowboys morphed into the Minnesota Vikings—a team that was competitive every year, had seasons where they looked the part of a legitimate Super Bowl threat and were always a good bet to win on a week-to-week basis, but also a team that never translated that into sustained postseason success. The Cowboys have been .500 or better in seven of the last eight years and they’ve won two of the last five NFC East titles, but they’ve also never advanced past the second round of the playoffs since their last Super Bowl year in 1995. Will 2012 be different? TheSportsNotebook breaks down the Cowboys…