You certainly have to give Dallas credit for one thing. They find creative ways to screw up, ways that haunt their fans for years. This is the team who brought us the Leon Lett game and Jackie Smith dropping a sure touchdown from Staubach in Super Bowl 13. And of course, who can forget Philadelphia recovering a fumble on their own one yard line and returning it 99 yards for the touchdown that wiped out the Cowboys playoff chances in 1974. In Super Bowl 5, all Craig Morton had to do was take the game into overtime. Instead he threw an interception which allowed the Colts rookie kicker to win the Super Bowl with three freaking seconds left!
The 80’s gave us the 12 men on the field Detroit field goal as time ran out to give the Lions a three point victory over Dallas they should never have had. Then there was the catch game which in and of itself was a standard two minute drive type game, but the Cowboys were off sides on 4th and short on that drive before “the catch” ever happened.
In addition to the Leon Lett game in the 90’s, the Cowboys also gave their fans the Dumb and Dumber sequence which cost them a game against the Eagles. I am probably leaving out a few creative losses, such as the seemingly endless string of 13-12 defeats suffered when the Cowboys went into freefall after the glory years of the early 90’s.
But the Cowboys of this decade have surpassed anything done by previous teams. Who can forget trying to kick the winning field goal against the Redskins in 2006, only to have the kick blocked, and a 15 yard personal foul penalty tacked on so the Redskins could kick the winning field goal with no time left on the clock. And of course, we all remember Romo mishandling the snap against Seattle in the playoffs that same year which would have given the Cowboys the lead with less than 30 seconds left in that game. Last year Westbrook purposely refrained from running into the end zone to ice a 10-6 upset over Dallas in Texas Stadium. Then we had that farce in the playoffs in which the Cowboys held the ball for over 10 minutes to score a touchdown, only to see the Giants answer back with one of their own in just a few seconds.
Having said all this, I have never seen anything like what happened against the Ravens! Never. I have seen teams get gashed for a long rushing touchdown right at the end of the game. It does happen. The defense is trying to stop the run and the running back pops through. But I have never seen this happen twice in a row. Never! You’ve got to be kidding me! How can you give up a 77 and then an 82 yard touchdown run on successive plays? Everyone in the known universe knows the Ravens are going to run and it still does not matter. Only the Cowboys could lose this way, really! OK, maybe the Texans suffered a similar epic meltdown against the Colts this year but that was your standard turnover which led to a touchdown. Even Buffalo’s brain cramp against the Jets was your standard turnover that should never have happened variety screw-up. But how does a 9-5 team with playoff aspirations allow a team to have two 70 plus touchdown runs on successive plays when everyone knows they are going to run the ball! Once is bad enough, but as I said, that happens sometimes. I recall Philadelphia doing this to Dallas once in the 80’s. Twice, though, is beyond absurd. If ever there was a game for throwing something through the TV, this one was it. Fortunately for my TV, this year’s Cowboys are not worth the cost of a new television.
Now that I have finished ranting, the Cowboys can still make the playoffs and I will always support them. Texas Stadium is no more, unless the Cowboys make the playoffs as the fifth seed and play the sixth seed in the NFC championship game. So let’s just say Texas Stadium is gone. The Cowboys have also given their fans many thrilling moments and I guess you take the good with the bad. After all, the Cowboys have won five Super Bowl titles. It could be worse. We could be the New Orleans Saints or Philadelphia Eagles, two teams who have never tasted a championship. Heck, we could be the Lions. The fact that we Cowboys fans scream and yell in frustration, and complain about Romo, Phillips, Owens and various other players and coaches shows that we are spoiled. We expect, we demand good teams because we are so used to having so many of them. From 1966 to 1984 we missed the playoffs one time, and it took a freak play to keep us out that one time. We were the first wild card team to make it to the Super Bowl and even though we lost, that was an unexpectedly good team. We went from 1-15 in 1989 to three out of four Super Bowls a few years later and were it not for a spate of first quarter turnovers against the 49ers in January of 1995, we probably would have won that year’s Super Bowl as well.
A lot of NFL fans are used to bad teams or used to failure at the last hurdle. The Eagles made it to three consecutive NFC championship games and lost. We did the same in the early 80’s. But the Eagles went one better than us. They made it to a 4th consecutive one and got over that hurdle only to lose by three points in the super Bowl against the Patriots. At least when we lost our three consecutive NFC championship games, we had two Super Bowl titles behind us, and we got three more in the 90’s. These helped take away the pain of those early 80’s teams. But the Eagles have nothing.
So in the end, yes this year’s Cowboys are frustrating. They may not make the playoffs. If they don’t, they will be one of the more disappointing teams in franchise history. But we Cowboys fans are always disappointed when our team does not do well, because those of us who have been fans for a long time are not used to failure. We don’t like failure. And this is something today’s players need to understand. We will cheer for T.O. and Romo, and Williams and Witten, and our defense no matter what happens. We may boo the players at times but it is because we know what our teams should be and what our teams once were. True Cowboys fans will never allow our team to accept failure.
So to this year’s players I say, everyone needs help once in a while. Let’s hope you get that help so you can go into Philadelphia next week knowing you can redeem the season. In a way, it will be satisfying if the Cowboys ruin yet another Eagles season by knocking them out of the playoff hunt and scraping in themselves, in a do or die match for both teams.
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