So in the glorious afterglow of post-pigskin coitus, we light up a smoke and share some of the lurid details of data to emerge from the Glamour Division entanglement.

 

Got this email late last night at the cardboard-box world headquarters:

 

“Watching the awesome Monday night game tonight. They threw out a stat that DONOVAN MCNABB WAS 1 OF 7 QBs all time that had 2,500 rushing yards and 25,000 passing yards. Of course, they didn't mention the other six. We think Fran Tarkenton, Randall Cunningham and Steve Young? Could you list the top 10 (or 7)? Thanks!” - Kathleen Kindle

 

Yeah, Kathleen, that’s annoying, isn’t it? The announcers rub up against your leg a bit, start moving their hands to your nether-regions, teasing you with a little statistical sweet nothings like this ... then they refuse to deliver the payoff pitch. Hell, sounds like our entire high school social life.

 

In any case, you have three of the 25,000-2,500 guys in Tarkenton, Cunningham and Young. With a little help from our friends at ProFootballReference.com, this is the whole list. Seems most of the usual suspects are on here, with one major surprise (at least we’d never have guessed Jim Harbaugh).

 

As for a top 10, we guess the only way to do that is to list the quarterbacks with 25,000 passing yards who came closest to reaching 2,500 rushing yards. Here are the next few names on the list. Some of them came real close, led by Detroit's greatest passer:

With his Cowboys off to a 2-0 start, Wade Phillips is quickly moving up the list of all-time winningest coaches. His career record, including postseason, now stands at 63-46 (.578).

 

In fact, since the start of the 2008 season, he’s jumped past four-time Super Bowl champion Chuck Noll (.572) and one-time AFL champion/one-time Super Bowl champion Hank Stram (.573) on the list of winningest coaches in history.

 

Phillips also jumped past Jimmy Conzelman (.571), the coach who led the pathetic Cardinals to the only championship-game victory in franchise history (1947).

 

Of course, the Phillips resume still has something of a hole in it: he’s the only man on our list of all-time winningest coaches without a single victory in the postseason (0-4).

 

We’re fairly certain that Noll rests comfortably each night with his four Super Bowl rings, while Phillips wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wishing he had never benched Doug Flutie.

 

The ESPN crew repeated a number of times that the 41-37 battle (78 total points) was the highest scoring game in the 98-game Cowboys-Eagles series (including playoffs), which dates back to the founding of the Cowboys in 1960.

 

The previous high came just four years ago, when the Super Bowl-bound Eagles pasted the Cowboys, 49-21, in Dallas (70 total points).

 

Before that, the series high was 63 total points, all in Dallas blowouts. The Cowboys won 41-22 in 1987, 49-14 in 1969 and 56-7 in 1966.

 

As we recounted before the start of the season, there’s no doubt that the NFC East is the NFL’s Glamour Division: four old-school, big-market teams with long histories and championship success.

 

It’s also a division that’s been utterly dominated by the Cowboys.

 

Dallas began playing each of its three current division rivals in its debut season of 1960. Here are the records since.

It’s interesting to note, though, that the Cowboys have not been nearly as successful against these teams in the playoffs (2-4 overall and 0-3 vs. Giants and Redskins). That fact is consistent with the many postseason disappointments America’s Team has endured over the years (which we chronicled here in our all-time franchise rankings this summer).

 

Cowboys-Eagles is the most played series in Dallas franchise history.

 

McNabb is not only one of seven 25,000-2,500 QBs in NFL history (as noted above), he further secured his spot atop the list of least intercepted passers in history Monday night.

 

McNabb threw another 37 passes Monday night without putting one on the hands of a Dallas defender. He's now thrown just 79 picks in 3,802 career attempts (2.08 interception percentage).

 

He began the season second on the all-time least intercepted list, just a shade behind Neil O’Donnell’s 68 picks in 3,229 attempts (2.11 percent)

 

To put McNabb's 79 career INTs into perspective, consider that future Hall of Famer Brett Favre threw 79 picks from 2004 to 2007 alone. McNabb has thrown 79 picks in a decade.

 

Tony Romo has a stunning 97.6 passer rating through his first 28 starts and 919 attempts.

 

If he can keep up this pace through the 2009 season, when he’ll reach the minimum 1,500 pass attempts needed to qualify for official NFL records, he very well could stand alone on top of the all-time passer rating list.

 

The current record is held by Steve Young (96.8).

 

Whew! How 'bout another smoke?