Is Cowboys’ season at a tipping point heading into Packers game? Dallas’ history says yes.

Five years ago, the Dallas Cowboys entered early October in a mini tailspin.

The team was 1-2 under new head coach Mike McCarthy, opponents were scoring a shocking 32.3 points per game, and significant grumbling was beginning to set in over the defensive scheme of coordinator Mike Nolan. Suddenly, Dallas was heading into a precarious Week 4 home matchup with the Cleveland Browns, a franchise that went 6-10 the previous season, leading to the firings of head coach Freddie Kitchens and general manager John Dorsey. Under new head coach Kevin Stefanski, the Browns were 2-1 and feeling very good about themselves. Conversely, McCarthy had barely exited September and he was already trying to stave off the feeling of something being undeniably broken on defense.

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Dallas lost to the Browns, 49-38. Afterward, the dam began to break, with defensive cornerstone and leader DeMarcus Lawrence letting loose on his unit.

“I’d call it soft,” Lawrence told reporters. “We’ve got to hold ourselves to a higher standard. I call this s*** soft.”

Ultimately, Lawrence’s criticism of Dallas’ defense proved to be right. But it also had issues that were compounded by the loss of quarterback Dak Prescott, who suffered a gruesome ankle fracture and dislocation in Week 5 against the New York Giants. Without Prescott, the offense would fall off a cliff the next week in a 38-10 loss to the Arizona Cardinals, triggering an NFL Network report that featured players anonymously ripping Nolan and the defensive staff as “totally unprepared” and criticizing their lack of in-game adjustments.

Once the Cowboys mercifully reached their Week 10 bye, they had compiled a 2-7 start and the season was effectively over. Dallas ultimately finished 6-10 and Nolan was fired at the end of the season. And the coming changes? They became a pivot point for McCarthy and the Cowboys, largely built on the hiring of Dan Quinn as the new defensive coordinator and the drafting of Micah Parsons.

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This is all a piece of recent Cowboys history that should resonate right now because something about that start in 2020 feels eerily familiar to what is currently going on in Dallas.

New head coach Brian Schottenheimer is sitting at 1-2 heading into a Week 4 home matchup — facing a 2-1 Green Bay Packers franchise that has the talent of an NFC Super Bowl contender. The Cowboys are once again wobbling on defense, with opponents having scored an average of 30.7 points per game. Players are looking lost at times, team owner Jerry Jones is getting questioned about in-season coaching changes and defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus has an ocean of fingers pointed in his direction as one of the Cowboys’ biggest problems. In the middle of it all, Parsons is making his return to Dallas, wearing a Green Bay uniform and with something to prove about what his value should have been to his former team.

And once again, someone is talking about standards in the midst of a troubling start to the season.

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“The standard is not the standard, and therefore we will make changes,” Schottenheimer told reporters this week. “Some will be scheme and some might even be personnel. We’ll see.”

On Thursday, we got a slightly better idea of what Schottenheimer was alluding to. With the Dallas secondary getting incinerated through three games — boasting a league-worst 13 pass plays of 25 yards or more — Eberflus told reporters that he’s simplifying the defensive calls on the field to a single word. All in hopes of rooting out confusion and getting personnel on the same page quickly. The result of the tweak was a Wednesday practice that left Schottenheimer encouraged. Schottenheimer also said the staff will have settled on changes in personnel packages and rotations by Friday night.

Simplifying defensive play communication to a single word while also making alterations to player packages isn’t exactly a minor tuneup this early in the season. And that’s part of what makes Sunday night’s game so important for the Cowboys. Maybe even to the point of the game being a must-win this early in the season. Once you start wrenching on a defensive scheme and the players running it, confidence is leveraged on what follows next.

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Thus far, the Eberflus defense has been a “get right” remedy for struggling quarterbacks, with the Giants’ Russell Wilson unloading a whopping 450 passing yards and three touchdowns on it in Week 2, and the Chicago Bears’ Caleb Williams finding his first groove of the season with 298 passing yards and four touchdowns in Week 3. This weekend, enter the Packers’ Jordan Love, who is coming off his worst game of the season. In a 13-10 loss to the Cleveland Browns last week, Love threw for only 183 yards and had a brutal fourth-quarter interception that factored heavily into the defeat. Now he’ll face a Cowboys defense that has one less sack on the entire season (four) than the number of times Love was sacked by the Browns (five).

If Love follows up his Browns lowlight with a “get right” game against the Cowboys like Wilson or Williams — and the Packers win in Parsons’ return — it could get ugly in Dallas quickly. Especially after Eberflus and the coaching staff made changes to get their defense on the same page. At the very least, it will fuel some of the early criticisms that Eberflus is either running a scheme that doesn’t fit the Cowboys’ personnel or that the players can’t pick up his system.

Not for nothing — those were the two primary criticisms of Nolan in 2020, too.

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Jones has already been asked about potentially making changes to the coaching staff in-season, with the defensive staff being the point of the question. Thus far, Jones has pushed back on the notion — much like he did in 2020 — choosing instead to suggest the unit simply has to grow.

“As we evolve toward the playoffs,” Jones told reporters after the loss to the Bears, “we’ve got to get better defensively.”

Of course, it’s not just Eberflus getting his unit right that makes Sunday night so pivotal. The Cowboys are already dragging around a spate of concerning injuries between wideout CeeDee Lamb (high ankle sprain), offensive guard Tyler Booker (high ankle sprain), and cornerbacks DaRon Bland (ankle) and Trevon Diggs (knee). While none are season-ending at this point, it’s worth noting that high ankle sprains can linger throughout a season if they are sustained to the point of missing games, while ankle and knee issues are easy to aggravate for cornerbacks whose jobs are so heavily leveraged on their ability to change direction instantaneously.

If those injuries linger — or the health of the Cowboys worsens — it remains to be seen how Dallas can respond. Apart from Prescott, Lamb is unquestionably the best skill position player on offense. His injury now puts immense pressure on George Pickens to prove that Dallas was right when it acquired him under the belief it was adding a co-number one receiver to the offense. Meanwhile, losing Booker threatens to damage a running game that has been effective to start the season. And the defensive injuries only complicate everything the coaching staff is trying to rewire after the rough start.

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All of this makes it bold for Jones to reply in the affirmative when asked if he still views the Cowboys as having a playoff team — which he did after the loss to the Bears. If he’s right, a Sunday win over the Packers is imperative. Since 1990, 14.3 percent of teams that started 1-3 — 35 of 244 — recovered to make the postseason.

Even for a self-proclaimed gambler like Jerry Jones, those are terrible odds. And he should know them very well because his 2020 team — with some of these very familiar defensive problems — was one of the 209 that started the season 1-3 and never made it out of the hole.