Tag: Wild Card Weekend

The Lions’ Cameron Sutton seemingly got away with a blatant hold of Puka Nacua on a critical third down

The refs let the Lions get away with an obvious hold on Sunday night’s most important play.

The Detroit Lions deserve credit. They certainly earned their first playoff win in over three decades over the Los Angeles Rams. To do it over longtime franchise quarterback Matthew Stafford should mean the world to Dan Campbell’s bunch. But most playoff wins usually come with a tinge of luck.

Sunday’s Wild Card affair in Detroit was no different.

With the Rams driving late in the fourth quarter, Stafford had Puka Nacua open — who dominated the Lions’ secondary all night — on a key third and long. Nacua unfortunately couldn’t come down with the catch, and the Rams punted the ball away, never to see it again in their eventual 24-23 loss.

There was just one problem. It seemed pretty apparent that Lions’ defensive back Cameron Sutton got away with an obvious hold of Nacua as Stafford launched the ball in his direction. I’m talking full-on jersey hold and a grip on his hips. But it’s the playoffs, referees will probably keep their whistles to themselves more than usual, and the Lions had homefield advantage.

So … sorry, Rams.

That’s not how it should work — the rules shouldn’t change or be open to interpretation just because it’s a playoff setting — but that seems to be what happened here.

Who knows what would’ve happened if Sutton would’ve been called for a penalty? The Lions clearly had no answer for Nacua and a gunslinging Stafford. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Rams come away with a field goal, at minimum, forcing the Lions’ offense to pull out all the stops on their final possession.

But I suppose credit is due to Sutton. Nacua was sauteeing the Lions’ defense. With the game on the line, Sutton understood that if he wasn’t cheating against a locked-in elite receiver, he probably wasn’t trying.

Dak Prescott tied himself to Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys fate with an unwarranted endorsement

Dak Prescott wants to go down with Mike McCarthy’s sinking ship.

The Cowboys have won 36 regular-season games under Mike McCarthy. They’ve won just one playoff game. When factoring in Jerry Jones’ obvious disappointment with that fact, it seems apparent that McCarthy might not be the head coach in Dallas for much longer.

And that is something that doesn’t sit well with Dak Prescott.

Prescott discussed his head coach’s future as the Cowboys picked up the pieces from an embarrassing Wild Card loss to the Green Bay Packers. He went as far as to say that his job as Cowboys quarterback should also be on the hot seat if McCarthy’s is in danger.

Oh, buddy. I wouldn’t willingly tie myself to the Titanic if I were you:

What Prescott says about McCarthy’s individual coaching of his play is probably true. While Prescott’s always been a good quarterback, in 2023, he was great, at one point even dominating the MVP conversation. That likely never happens without McCarthy designing a tailor-made offense for his skill set.

But the playoff failures are impossible to ignore. If the Cowboys aren’t outright choking a win away, Sunday showed that they might not show up altogether, either. It doesn’t matter what McCarthy did for Prescott. Such a reality is unsustainable. Prescott has one year left on a monster contract and seems due for a massive extension from the Cowboys this off-season.

The veteran quarterback would do well to toe the company line and realize he can probably produce such gaudy numbers — with more success in January — with another head coach.

A dejected Jerry Jones was at a loss for words after the Cowboys’ playoff no-show against the Packers

Jerry Jones is VERY mad about the Cowboys. Watch out, Mike McCarthy.

Aside from tortured Dallas Cowboys fans, no one has likely felt the team’s perennial playoff disappointment more than owner Jerry Jones. It is Jones who has seemingly pulled out all the stops to turn Dallas back into a marquee team with a roster worthy of contending for the Super Bowl.

Yet again, all he has to show for it is a 48-32 playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers that was never all that close.

After Sunday’s defeat, Jones spoke to the gathered press contingent. Actually, scratch that. Because he was so rattled, Jones could only describe the Cowboys’ latest failure as “painful” and “beyond comprehension.” He couldn’t even discuss Mike McCarthy’s potentially shaky future as the head coach in Dallas. (He’s probably already made his decision about McCarthy, anyway.)

Phew.

If a team owner looks and sounds beyond depressed about one playoff loss, you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of upheaval is on the horizon. And Jones, much more than most NFL owners, should be expected to deliver on such a notion.

The Cowboys should fire Mike McCarthy for wasting Dallas’ best Super Bowl shot in 3 decades

It’s time for the Cowboys to give up on Mike McCarthy.

Nothing about the Dallas Cowboys’ performance on Sunday was easy on the eyes.

Before they could blink, the Green Bay Packers — with a first-year starting quarterback, mind you — jumped on the NFC’s No. 2 seed with a 27-0 lead. Whenever it seemed like the Cowboys might make matters interesting, Green Bay returned with a resounding haymaker, eventually driving Dallas’ own fans to leave a postseason game with over 16 minutes (!) left. In hindsight, it is so poetic that the Cowboys became the first NFL team to lose to a No. 7 seed since the league expanded the playoff format in 2020. Of course it would be pro football’s premier punching bags suffering that kind of loss first. Of course they’d do it in a humiliating fashion.

If you were surprised by the Cowboys’ ineptitude in a 48-32 loss, I’d urge you to change your tone. That final score is not nearly indicative of the Packers’ butt-whooping of their long-time NFC rival. This is par for the course for McCarthy’s Cowboys. Build lofty (but reasonable!) expectations, and lay a giant egg as soon as every game is sudden death.

And that is precisely why if the Cowboys aspire to end their 28-year Super Bowl drought, McCarthy can no longer be their head coach.

Since Mike McCarthy took over, the Cowboys have won 36 regular-season games in the last three years. They’ve captured two NFC East titles. They’ve developed blue-chip talents like Micah Parsons, CeeDee Lamb, and even Tyler Smith. For all intents and purposes, they have resembled a Super Bowl contender. On paper, this team has all the horses to win three or four consecutive games in the winter and eventually hoist a Lombardi Trophy in February. There is no debate. Many NFL coaches would likely kill to coach this kind of stacked roster.

Despite this reality, this iteration of the Cowboys owns just one playoff win over a washed-up Tom Brady. They have zero appearances on Championship Sunday, a blemish that long predates McCarthy, but, appropriately, hasn’t ended under his shaky watch.

Dearest readers, welcome to the McCarthy Experience.

McCarthy does deserve credit for changing up his postseason script. Usually, Cowboys playoff disappointments at least go down to the wire. It is there where McCarthy costs his team with questionable time management and play-calling. I would run out of fingers if I tried to count every instance McCarthy broke out into a flop sweat when he had to make a critical decision in a playoff game. He has a notorious but well-deserved reputation for self-combusting as soon as his players and coaches need him to be a leader.

He is a living, breathing meme of a coach.

But the Cowboys didn’t even bother letting McCarthy blow it on Sunday. An early 14-0 deficit felt insurmountable. The Cowboys’ body language on the sideline made it seem like they were already defeated. The audible frustration of their home stadium made it feel like fans knew a decisive knockout to the mat was inevitable. Because it was. This whole afternoon reeked of an organization being rattled by the slightest hint of adversity — the last trait you want when trying to capture that elusive Super Bowl championship.

That falls on McCarthy’s shoulders, too.

If a football team is a reflection of its head coach, then these Cowboys have captured McCarthy’s fragile essence perfectly. They are frontrunners who love beating up on bottom feeders and wilting under the bright spotlight. They take one punch to the mouth and drop to their knees to beg for mercy. The next big play a Cowboys player makes with the game on the line in mid-January will be the first in a long time. No one — and I mean no one — knows how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory quite like McCarthy’s Cowboys.

These Cowboys are McCarthy’s team — a bumbling loser propped up by one magical Aaron Rodgers playoff run roughly 13 years ago — through and through. If the reports are true, McCarthy’s final evaluation of his job did not go swimmingly:

Firing McCarthy now is a necessity. The Cowboys are not an over-the-hill squad. They have the pieces to make a run and shift their narrative as early as next season. With the right coach in tow, this organization might stop being the butt of the joke for the rest of the football world every year.

That’s what could make Sunday’s humiliation a blessing.

The Packers might have saved the Cowboys from themselves. They might have put a merciful end to the McCarthy era that was clearly never going anywhere.

Video shows Cowboys fans filing out of the stadium in the third quarter as the Packers embarrassed them

Cowboys fans were so fed up they started leaving in the THIRD QUARTER!

Seemingly everything about the Dallas Cowboys’ woeful performance against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday was embarrassing. Dallas barely showed up in a lifeless first half, people started calling for Bill Belichick to be the head coach, and an exasperated Jimmy Johnson delivered a heated pep talk. No wonder Jerry Jones was so frustrated.

But all of that pales in comparison to Cowboys fans giving up on their miserable team. In a video courtesy of the Dallas Morning News’ Michael Gehlken, fans started filing out of the Cowboys’ home stadium in the third quarter.

Frankly, I can’t blame these people. It was 41-16, with the Cowboys laying a trademark giant egg in the playoffs. Still, it was the third quarter!

That’s how sad it’s gotten in Dallas:

After more playoff disappointment, many changes are likely coming down the pipe for the Cowboys. This roster is far too talented to lose like this in do-or-die games year after year. And judging from the response from Cowboys fans here, it doesn’t seem like they have much faith that anything meaningful will shift soon.

Jimmy Johnson delivered a passionate pep talk during Fox’s halftime show after the Cowboys’ awful start

Jimmy Johnson is tired of watching the Cowboys choke in the playoffs.

Anyone who follows the NFL closely is accustomed to the Dallas Cowboys crumbling in the playoffs. It may as well be a January tradition. And after getting embarrassed by the Green Bay Packers so badly on Sunday that people started joking about Bill Belichick, one notable person decided enough was enough.

Former Cowboys coaching legend Jimmy Johnson.

During Fox’s halftime show, Johnson looked directly into the camera and delivered a weirdly passionate pep talk to the Cowboys with their season hanging in the balance. He professed that he’d keep it clean before saying the players need to get their “rear-ends” in order.

I’m not stunned this happened, but I love seeing Johnson still show this kind of emotion for the Cowboys:

Whether the Cowboys saw Johnson’s message is irrelevant. It’s apparent that all this consistent playoff failure is starting to wear on some Dallas franchise legends. We’ll see whether the Cowboys can change Johnson’s tune by the end of this Wild Card battle.

The Cowboys’ lifeless first half against the Packers had NFL fans making so many Bill Belichick jokes

Would Bill Belichick really work for Jerry Jones? It feels VERY possible now.

Even after parting ways with the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick apparently still wants to coach in the NFL. And when taking Sunday’s early Wild Card Game results into account, his next gig very well might come with the Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys entered their opening postseason matchup with the Green Bay Packers as the NFC’s No. 2 seed. They had legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, with Mike McCarthy looking to bury his demons with his old team. Instead, Dallas fell behind 27-7 at halftime, with the Cowboys looking lifeless for the better part of 30 minutes. No wonder Jimmy Johnson was so openly upset.

Even a 14-0 deficit seemed like it hit the Cowboys like a Mack Truck.

When combining such poor body language with a terrible performance, NFL fans connected the dots. It was time for owner Jerry Jones to make the call to Belichick. Of course, halfway through a playoff game, these were only jokes. But I can’t think of a better opportunity for Belichick to coach a possible contender than with the Cowboys’ talented roster.

Should the Cowboys’ humiliation indeed be cemented, don’t discount Belichick calling Dallas home soon enough.

Even after a playoff win, Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs have never felt more vulnerable

The fatally-flawed Chiefs seem destined for a short postseason.

In the last half-decade, the Kansas City Chiefs have been the NFL’s gold standard.

No one has won more regular-season games. No one has won and or appeared in more Super Bowls. No one has appeared more unbeatable in clutch moments, especially with their backs against the wall. The competition simply can’t compare to the peak success of the Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, and Travis Kelce era. The Chiefs have set the pace for everyone else. At every turn, they’ve lapped the field.

Unfortunately for Kansas City, the Chiefs couldn’t maintain this blistering pace forever.

Saturday night featured another Chiefs playoff victory, this time over an uninspiring Miami Dolphins squad. Kansas City will now play in the Divisional Round for the sixth straight season. Should the Chiefs win next weekend, they will extend their streak of AFC title game appearances to six, sitting only behind the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick New England Patriots (eight). Ah, but there’s the rub. Because such a possibility — continued Chiefs postseason success this year, that is — has never felt more unrealistic.

The Chiefs themselves aren’t in a position to quibble about a 19-point win in January. After their rampant inconsistencies this year, Saturday night was likely the most complete game Kansas City had played in weeks.

But I’m not moved by any perceived dominance over a team from South Florida playing in beyond-frigid conditions. I’m not impressed by a win over an injury-battered squad missing several key starters on both sides of the ball, including starting pass rushers Bradley Chubb and Jaelan Phillips, star safety Jevon Holland, and starting guard Connor Williams. I’m not moved by shutting down Tua Tagovailoa, a quarterback who has demonstrated he doesn’t possess the aptitude necessary to overcome physical defensive play from quality opponents.

To say the Dolphins were an unmitigated pretender would be akin to saying  “water is wet.” The Chiefs outgained the Dolphins by almost 150 yards and held them to a single third-down conversion. It’s hard to debate those results at face value. But I’d argue that was much more a circumstance of a favorable matchup with a top-heavy team that almost literally limped into the postseason. This wasn’t classic Chiefs football.

This was a fortuitous first-round draw:

Nothing we saw from the Chiefs on Saturday night was a contrast from their up-and-down play during the second half of the regular season. The offense still struggled to generate big plays, averaging just 5.5 yards per play while Mahomes’ average yards per pass attempt was 6.4. The offense still struggled in the red zone, achieving a middling 33 percent conversion rate that won’t inspire an ounce of fear in any of the AFC’s heavyweights. If Rashee Rice doesn’t come prepared with a monster yards-after-the-catch performance, it’s hard to envision Kansas City scoring more than 20 points. And it’s hard to see this cautious version of Mahomes overcoming his supporting cast’s limitations. We’ve been talking about these same Chiefs’ red flags since November. They look like the same exact team.

If the Chiefs’ offense is somehow at its “best” when it turtles and settles for dump-offs, then they can’t be trusted.

Kansas City can rest some of its laurels on a special defense that flew around all over the field against Miami. From Chris Jones to Nick Bolton and L’Jarius Sneed, there are field-tilters at every level of this unit. This defense can change and win a game on its own if given the opportunity. But the same could be said for the Baltimore Ravens and the rival Buffalo Bills. The Chiefs were more intimidating when they had the ultimate trump card — a high-flying offense led by Mahomes. That is no longer the case. If all of these strikes against another Chiefs’ deep playoff run weren’t enough, should the AFC field shake out as expected, the Chiefs would likely have to go on the road to beat both the Bills and Ravens just to make a return trip to the Super Bowl.

Such is life when you no longer have that advantageous Kansas City home field.

There is a fraught danger in counting out perhaps the most talented quarterback ever to play (Mahomes), maybe the finest offensive coach ever (Reid), and a future First-Ballot Hall of Fame tight end (Kelce). If any team can play beyond its means, it is this iteration of Kansas City. All bets should be off until the Chiefs are officially sent to the golf course. More supremacy from the NFL’s Big Red Machine this winter wouldn’t be surprising.

Yet, there’s a key distinction between these Chiefs and the ones that qualified for three of the last four Super Bowls. Those editions of Kansas City were flawed, too. Some couldn’t play a lick of defense. Some didn’t have a legitimate No. 1 receiver. Some were too injured in their own right. But these were never issues stacked on top of each other, further compounding their problems. By contrast, these Chiefs have a laundry list of issues to overcome. They are constructed like a fragile house of cards, asking their superhero quarterback to transcend a delicate situation that demands absolute perfection. Even Mahomes isn’t capable of such absurd wizardry.

Come to think of it: who could be?

The lower-power Chiefs should be commended for advancing to the NFL’s quarterfinals once again. Their play on Saturday night — even in a win — might be a sign that there may not be much more to celebrate about this season.

The Chiefs-Dolphins game demonstrated how awful Jason Garrett is as an announcer

Jason Garrett should not be an NFL announcer.

If the NFL and NBC wanted people to watch the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins’ playoff matchup through a Peacock subscription, the least they could’ve done is give us a better color commentator than Jason Garrett. When I say “better,” I mean that it would’ve been preferable to listen to three hours of random Wilhelm Screams than hear Garrett’s milquetoast, nonsensical analysis of an NFL postseason affair.

Don’t believe me?

What if I told you that Garrett called Patrick Mahomes a “sneaky good athlete” like he’d never watched him play before? What if I said he seemed to make a reference to Vitamin C’s infamous melody about over-appreciating one’s high school years? And these are just two examples!

At seemingly every turn, rather than add, you know, color to a broadcast, Garrett opted for the low-hanging fruit. He offered the most anodyne possible descriptions of sequences during the game and flip-flopped constantly on his opinions. He called Chiefs-Dolphins like a robot beholden to the binary code, not a human being who knows how to talk to other human beings.

Needless to say, NFL fans had enough of Garrett during an agonizingly awful broadcast.

Noah Eagle’s sharp announcing during Texans-Browns drew rave reviews from NFL fans

It was a joy listening to Noah Eagle call the Texans’ playoff win.

In the absence of the legendary Al Michaels, we heard a relatively new voice call the Houston Texans’ resounding 45-14 win over the Cleveland Browns on Saturday afternoon. It was young play-by-play commentator Noah Eagle — son of Ian, CBS’s No. 2 NFL announcer — who got the booth with partner Todd Blackledge.

And in the aftermath, the general consensus seems to be that Eagle did quite well while setting up a fantastic moment for the city of Houston.

For one, there was this excellent call after a second Texans’ pick-six to ice the victory:

There was also this reference to Houston offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik as a “young man.” Note: Eagle is 26.

Eagle will be NBC’s No. 2 playoff announcer this postseason. Judging by the early returns, the network made a smart decision to give the mic to the rising announcer.