The Cowboys gave up their first touchdown Sunday night on the first play of the second quarter. It touched off an avalanche of points by the high-powered Eagles offense that nearly buried the visitors from Dallas.
And although the Cowboys grabbed their shovels and started digging, things proved to be just a little too deep. They left Philadelphia on the short end of a 26-17 final score.
But what the Cowboys found while they were clawing their way to daylight could come in very handy before the season is over.
“I think there’s always value when someone cracks you in the jaw, and you fight back and have a chance to win the game,” McCarthy said in his postgame press conference. “That’s what this league is about, and frankly, you can’t get to where we want to go without going through it.”
Where they want to go is where most of the teams will be of a similar caliber. The silver lining is that the Cowboys may have just seen the best of the bunch.
“This is the most productive football team we’ve played to date,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy confirmed.
And the second quarter sure proved it. Up 7-0 after five seconds of the quarter had elapsed, the Eagles defense picked off Cooper Rush on the Cowboys’ very next offensive snap, setting up passer Jalen Hurts on a short field.
Four minutes later, it was 14-0. The Cowboys went four-and-out, blowing a fourth-down play that replays indicated they shouldn’t have had to try. Eagles’ ball on the Dallas 34. The Cowboys defense stiffened, but before the second frame had reached the midway point, Philadelphia led 17-0.
“That’s a difficult offense to play against,” McCarthy continued. “We knew we were going to have to stop the run to get this game tilted the way we want to play it. That’s the challenge they give everybody. I thought our guys did a good job against Hurts.”
Overall, Hurts didn’t do a ton of damage. While he tossed two touchdowns (the first time this year Dallas has given up multiple TDs to any opponent) he ended the night with just 155 passing yards and gained only 27 on the ground.
And statistically speaking, the Cowboys defense actually kept the whole Eagles offense mostly in check. They held Philadelphia to just 286 total net yards, the lowest tally of the Eagles’ six wins by over 70 yards.
Then again, every single play Philly ran in that fateful second quarter (except for the final one as time was about to expire) came on the Cowboys’ side of the 50. With the Cowboys repeatedly giving the Eagles wildly favorable field position, Hurts didn’t need to chew up a lot of yardage to score a lot of points.
At halftime, the Eagles led 20-3, and it looked like the rout was on.
But Rush and the Cowboys came out swinging after the break.
“You just keep playing ball,” Rush explained to reporters after the game. “We know what we’ve got on offense, we know the talent we have, our scheme, we know what we’re capable of. Sometimes it’s going to be ugly; it’s the NFL and they’ve got good players, too. I wouldn’t say there was any panic. We just had to keep going. We kept shooting ourselves in the foot a little bit with some throws, penalties. Then we got going [in the] third quarter, showed what we were about. We love the fight.”
Rush and the Cowboys ate up 11-plus minutes of clock in the third quarter, scoring one touchdown and driving inside the Eagles’ 15 on their way to a second. The backup went 7-of-10 for 89 passing yards and a score in the third quarter alone, and another touchdown to come two plays into the fourth.
Fourteen unanswered points; a minute into the final quarter, the Cowboys had all the momentum and were improbably trailing by just a field goal, 20-17.
“It felt like we were flipping the game,” McCarthy said.
It was not to be, though, as Hurts and the Eagles got back on track and added another touchdown. Another Rush interception spoiled their best chance at a comeback bid, and the 59-yard Brett Maher field goal needed to keep even the hopes of a miracle finish alive drifted just right.
With three interceptions, ten penalties, a missed field goal, a call that should have been challenged but wasn’t, and that overwhelming and concentrated second-quarter barrage by their opponent, the Cowboys were indeed their own worst enemy Sunday night.
But the team’s valiant comeback effort in the second half of a hard-fought game was an invaluable experience that will likely pay dividends as the season wears on.
The Cowboys have posted bigger comebacks with Dak Prescott at the controls. This season’s crew has rallied late without him to beat both the Bengals and Giants. And they might have taken down the league’s last unbeaten team if they hadn’t beaten themselves instead.
McCarthy compared Sunday night’s game to getting cracked in the jaw. Now it’s time for Prescott and the Cowboys to get up off the mat.
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