Mike Finger: Cooper squelches ‘overpay’ barbs in victory.
Dallas’ trade for difference-making receiver pays off in OT win
ARLINGTON — The insults wouldn’t have worked if they didn’t include at least a small bit of truth. That goes for what a Philadelphia linebacker said about the Cowboys last week, and what basically everyone in the NFL said about the market value of Amari Cooper.
Kamu Grugier-Hill wasn’t entirely wrong when he pointed out the Cowboys have a history of blowing opportunities. And none of the people who accused Jerry Jones of overpaying for Cooper were wrong when they noted Dallas offered more for him than anyone else would.
Neither the Cowboys nor Cooper needed to be confronted with their recent failures. They had not forgotten them.
But on Sunday afternoon at AT&T Stadium, two narratives changed, perhaps not forever but emphatically for now. Given a chance to choke the way Grugier-Hill swore was in their nature, the Cowboys declined. And given a chance to prove again that it was the rest of the league who miscalculated at the trade deadline, Cooper seized it.
“I know what I’m worth,” Cooper said.
Now the rest of the league does, too.
Maybe another Dallas collapse will come next month. Maybe the first-round draft pick Jones shipped to Oakland for Cooper will become a Hall of Famer. But after the Cowboys’ new star receiver lifted them to a 29-23 overtime victory over Philadelphia and all but wrapped up the NFC East title, the “chokers” and “overpay” barbs never sounded sillier.
They started to sound silly early in the fourth quarter when, having dominated all afternoon but still finding themselves in a tied game, the Cowboys pulled ahead on a perfect 28-yard pass from Dak Prescott to Cooper down the sideline.
They sounded even sillier Amari Cooper’s 3rd touchdown beats Eagles 29-23.
when, after the Eagles tied the score again, Cooper convinced Prescott to make exactly the kind of play Jones dreamed of when he traded for him last month.
All game long, Cooper had noticed that Philadelphia’s cornerbacks were jumping all over his stop routes. He thought it was, to use his word, “ridiculous,” and he begged Prescott to make them pay for it.
When they broke the huddle on the first play of a drive with just over three minutes left, Cooper kept hounding his
quarterback to go deep. Prescott didn’t budge.
But when they got to the line of scrimmage, and Prescott saw the coverage?
“I guess he thought about it again,” Cooper said. “He kind of signaled (for) a go route, and I was elated.”
The result was a 75-yard touchdown catch and run for Cooper, but even that wasn’t what really provided the final answer to Grugier-Hill, who last week told a Philadelphia TV station that if “you look at Dallas’ history, they always choke.”
When the Eagles answered Cooper’s second touchdown with yet another of their own, and when the Cowboys, nearing field-goal range, literally went backwards on two disastrous plays in a row in the closing seconds of regulation, GrugierHill still looked like an oracle.
But Cowboys did lots of nonCowboys things in overtime, and it wasn’t just Cooper. Prescott, who had committed three ugly turnovers, calmly led a long march that ate up almost the entire clock of the extra period.
Then Dallas coach Jason Garrett, known for never making a decision without opting for the most conservative, boring option, bucked his own reputation. Facing fourth-and-1 from the Philadelphia 19, the Cowboys could have kicked a field goal, which would have given the Eagles the ball with about two minutes to either force a tie or win the game outright.
Garrett chose instead to hand the ball to Ezekiel Elliott, eschewing the safety net of a tie while increasing the likelihood of both a rousing victory and a crushing loss.
“You’ve got to take risks with the division on the line,” Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence said later. “You can’t put it in the kicker’s hands.”
It was a bold gamble, but certainly not one you would associate with a choker. And when Elliott ran for a first down, and Cooper followed it by snagging a tipped pass out of the air and scampering into the end zone for his third touchdown of the day?
Two insults suddenly lost just a little bit of validity. The Cowboys were clutch, and Cooper looked like a bargain.
In the Eagles’ locker room after the game, someone asked Grugier-Hill if he regretted calling the Cowboys chokers.
“No,” he said. “It’s a rivalry week.”
It was just as well. He hadn’t been completely wrong at the time, just as the critiques of the Cooper trade had merit in the moment.
But on a day when the Cowboys refused to choke, Cooper played like a superstar.
“I feel like that’s who I am,” he said.
He’d heard the insults, just like the rest of the Cowboys had. They couldn’t refute them at the time. But one day like Sunday at a time, they sure can make them sound a little less truthful.