Eagles and Cowboys Square off for the NFC East Crown

This one has been a year in the making.

It was, after all, just over a year ago that the Philadelphia Eagles ended the Dallas Cowboys season with a 44 to 6 laugher at Lincoln Financial Field that simultaneously put the Birds into the playoffs.

The game sent the Eagles on an improbable run to the NFC Championship game, while leading the Cowboys to make sweeping changes to their own roster.

Now, in what may be the final game of the inaugural season of the new Cowboys Stadium, these two divisional rivals are set for a rematch with serious playoff implications.

Sunday’s winner will be the NFC East Champions. A victory guarantee’s a home playoff game. Depending on the result of the Vikings-Giants match-up, a win could also get Philadelphia the 2^nd-seed in the conference, as well as the valuable bye-week that comes along with it.

So now these two teams meet again, with so much on the line, but perhaps nothing more valuable than the ability to change their own legacies.

Dallas represents one of the NFL’s most successful franchises currently stuck in one of its darkest points. It has been over a decade since the Cowboys were on the winning end of a playoff game. The very idea that there are teenagers in Dallas who don’t remember what it’s like to be Super Bowl Champions is shocking and unheard of.

The Eagles, meanwhile, have experienced their most successful era this past decade, which remains a bittersweet fact to the Philadelphia faithful. Five divisional championships and eight playoff appearances in the 2000’s have sadly been overshadowed by the Eagles inability to win the big one.

Perhaps nowhere are these team’s legacies more obvious than in the reputation of their quarterbacks. Both Tony Romo and Donovan McNabb put up stats this season worthy of a Pro-Bowl selection. Both have scored a lot of touchdowns, completed a lot of passes, and won a lot of games while under center for their respective teams.

Yet they are both ring-less, having a combined zero Super Bowl victories, and labeled as late-season choke artists. For Romo, he is viewed as Mr. November, a statistical maverick with an unexplainable inability to produce in the years final month. For McNabb, his big-game choking is traced to the NFC Championship, where he sports a gut-wrenching 1-4 record.

A victory this Sunday could end up doing nothing to adjust these legacies. In fact, quick playoff exits would only enhance the view that these two quarterbacks are perennial chokers. But by winning the division, each quarterback would be putting their team in an advantageous position to make a deep push into the playoffs.

With the New Orleans Saints experiencing their first losing-streak of the year, and the Minnesota Vikings dealing with Brett Favre Mania, the Birds and the Boys represent the NFC’s two hottest teams.

A victory Sunday will make one of them the popular pick to represent the conference in the Super Bowl.

Achieve that, and the viewpoint of these two teams, as well as the men who lead them, will be changed forever.

Eric Marmon wrote this for SportEvents.com, which helps real NFL fans find NFL game tickets and tickets to the Super Bowl.