Sunday’s game could ultimately decide the NFC East champion.

Sunday Night Football kicks off its regular season with a time-honored showdown between two fierce NFC East rivals. The Giants will head south to Texas for a Week 1 contest against the Cowboys; the broadcast begins at 8:30 p.m. ET and will be carried nationwide by NBC (live stream).

Eli Manning, a longtime competitor for the title of best quarterback in the division, will have to fend off a challenge from a second-year competitor. Dak Prescott lit the league on fire as a rookie, taking advantage of Tony Romo’s latest (and, it turned out, final) injury to start all 16 games for the NFC’s No. 1-seeded team. After emerging as an MVP candidate in his very first year, he’ll have to prove he can escape a sophomore slump and hang with Manning on a national stage Sunday night.

Time, TV channel, and streaming info

• Time: 8:30 p.m. ET
• Location: AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas
• TV: NBC
• Streaming: NBC Sports Live
• Odds: Dallas is favored by 3 points.

Giants at Cowboys news:

• Johnathan Hankins is a Colt now, so expect Jay Bromley to have a breakout year in his stead.

What impressed me most about his film last year was how good he was at controlling one blocker, then coming off and making the tackle.

If he was single blocked, Bromley would get good extension with his arms and knock the offensive lineman back until he could control him and escape off the block to wherever the ball carrier was.

• Jaylon Smith’s journey back to the football field was a bright spot in an otherwise grim Dallas offseason.

The nerve damage from the injury was so severe that there were questions whether or not he’d ever play again, but the Cowboys rolled the dice and took Smith in the second round.

Smith didn’t appear in a game as a rookie, and now — more than a year and a half after suffering the injury — he’s finally on the field in a Cowboys uniform.

• The NFL and the NFLPA are going to war in the courtroom over Ezekiel Elliott’s six-game suspension. For now, it’s on hold thanks to an injunction:

A federal court in Texas ruled Friday to extend an injunction that will delay Ezekiel Elliott’s six-game suspension. Elliott is free and clear to take the field for the Cowboys until Judge Amos Mazzant issues a final ruling on Elliott’s pending lawsuit against the NFL. Elliott will likely play out the 2017 season.

• There are about a thousand moving parts to Ezekiel Elliott’s domestic violence case; here’s a comprehensive list of everything that’s happened.
• Here’s what the Giants depth chart looks like headed into the 2017 opener.

The “who is the right guard” question keeps coming up. The answer is, the same guy who has been in that starting spot all along — John Jerry.

Somewhat strangely, the Giants list fullback Shane Smith as the third-team tight end.

• Here are the five players who will have the biggest impact on whether or not the Cowboys can repeat as the NFC’s No. 1 team.

Sean Lee is the heart and soul of the Cowboys defense. He makes the defense go and is the clear leader of the unit. The veteran linebacker is the one that the defense looks up to, and he is the one that is making sure everybody is in correct position in between snaps.

Cowboys have high standards to live up to in 2017.

Dallas’s breakout 2016 was unexpected — the kind of turnaround that could only be engineered by two game-changing rookies and one of the league’s best offensive lines. Sustaining that elite pace will be difficult, but the team’s play over the last half of the prior year lends hope. The Cowboys went 8-2 after their bye week, with one loss coming in a meaningless Week 17 showdown with Philadelphia. That means teams had time to scout and plan for the Prescott/Elliott show — and still struggled to contain it.

Giants at Cowboys prediction:

Our experts were a little divided on this game, but six out of nine went with the Cowboys to beat the Giants.