Dallas Cowboys hold all the cards in NFC
Team chemistry a big part of success story, says Canadian defensive end
Here’s how far ahead of the pack the Dallas Cowboys are in the NFC.
If they defeat the New York Giants on Sunday night, and two other games go their way, the Cowboys could lose their final three regular-season games and it wouldn’t matter.
They’d still own home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs.
That’s what losing just once over the first three-quarters of the NFL season can do for you.
Dallas owns the league’s best record at 11-1. As flattering as their position is, with as favourable a road to the Super Bowl as any team could hope to have entering Week 14, Tyrone Crawford says there’s little danger the Cowboys will fixate on anything beyond the pavement under their feet.
“I feel like with this team, we don’t even really have to mention that. We all know it,” the Cowboys’ starting defensive end from Windsor, Ont., said this week in a phone interview from the team’s practice facility in Frisco, Texas.
“Obviously, we’re going to have our coaches and different players talk about not doing that. But I feel like the guys we have in this locker-room are in that mindset already, of just wanting to stack W’s, week by week, and keeping all those outside distractions right where they’re at, on the outside.”
The Cowboys hope to snare their 12th victory without interruption since dropping their opener to the Giants. This week’s rematch is the first of three straight prime-time games for Dallas. Next week the Cowboys play host to Tampa Bay on Sunday night, and on Boxing Day the Detroit Lions visit Big D for Monday Night Football.
This week’s NFC East clash is not without meaning for the Giants.
At 8-4, they could keep alive their slim division-title hopes, while strengthening their grip on the NFC’s top wild-card playoff berth as an acceptable consolation prize.
That the Giants held on to hand the Cowboys’ their only loss, 20-19 in Week 1, also is not without meaning.
“A lot of us didn’t have our best game that week,” said Crawford, one of two Canadians on America’s Team, along with 12th-year long-snapper L.P. Ladouceur of Montreal. “So we’re excited to go out there and play them again, when we’re hopefully at our best.
“We’re a total team now. We’re going to go into it the same way we go into every game, ready to battle.”
Dallas is the only NFL club to have clinched a playoff berth already. With four games to play, it is one victory from clinching the NFC East title. And to secure the NFC’s top playoff seed and home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs, it needs only to win once more while Seattle loses once and Detroit loses or ties once.
Much of the credit for the Cowboys’ stunning turnaround from last year’s 4-12 record rightfully goes to the two rookie phenoms on offence: quarterback Dak Prescott and running back Ezekiel Elliott.
Not only are both in contention for NFL offensive rookie-of-theyear honours, but even league MVP.
Prescott began the season as a temporary replacement for Tony Romo, the club’s longtime starter who suffered a compression fracture of a vertebrae in late August.
Just four months earlier, Prescott had been the eighth QB selected in the NFL draft, 135th overall, in the fourth round. No one expected anything impactful from him in 2016.
But with one of the best performances by a rookie passer in NFL history, and one of the most memorable seasons by any Cowboys passer, period, Prescott has wrested the starting job from a now-healthy Romo.
Elliott, meantime, leads the league in both rushing (1,285 yards) and rushing first downs (76, far ahead of second-place Melvin Gordon’s 59), and he ranks second in both total yards from scrimmage (1,607) and rushing touchdowns (12).
Crawford, 27, said the heroic rookies have been game-changers for the Cowboys, but not just on the field.
They’ve injected a magnetic blend of exuberance, confidence and camaraderie off it.
“A lot of our success this year has to do with those two,” said Crawford, a fifth-year NFLer. “They brought this chemistry to the locker-room, almost like a college-type atmosphere. They kind of sparked up a brotherhood here. They’ve been amazing. So much energy.
“We’re playing our type of ball. Being the family that we are now, we’ve just got to keep rolling like that.”