making money and losing in the playoffs

Photograph: Michael Ainsworth/AP

The Dallas Cowboys in the playoffs are always a must-watch, usually for all the wrong reasons. With their 1990s run of dominance firmly in time’s rearview mirror, the Cowboys’ 21st-century legacy mostly consists of postseason disappointment. After grabbing the NFC’s second seed in the regular season, it felt like these Cowboys should have easily handled a visiting Green Bay Packers team that many thought were just happy to be here.

Except, these are the Cowboys, a team who haven’t made it to the NFC Championship Game since 1995. At this point, their fans have come to expect embarrassment no matter how heavily the odds seem stacked in their favor.

Still, not even the most pessimistic fans imagined that Dallas’s defense would allow the Packers to score 27 unanswered points in the first half on Sunday, their largest playoff deficit since 1969. Dallas needed a defensive penalty to score a touchdown before the end of the half just to make it 27-7 heading into the break.

The momentum did not carry over into the second half, as MVP of the Week candidate Aaron Jones answered with his third rushing touchdown of the game early in the third quarter. That effectively ended Dallas’s comeback hopes, although a few Dallas touchdowns in garbage time resulted in a final 48-32 scoreline that made the game look slightly less like the epic beatdown that it really was. After all, the Cowboys’ previous high as far as points allowed in a postseason game was 38; the Packers topped that by the third quarter on Sunday.

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While Green Bay’s second-half defense left something to be desired, it was still an impressive road victory. Once again, the franchise has managed a successful quarterback succession, replacing Aaron Rodgers with understudy Jordan Love just as Rodgers replaced Brett Favre years prior. Love threw for three touchdowns in an…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/9bn-cowboys-excel-two-things-082008948.html

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2024-01-15 08:20:08

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