Cowboys dealt another reality check
They can’t get past divisional round
LOS ANGELES – So this is how it ends for the Cowboys.
The rising defense gets run out of town. Ezekiel Elliott gets stuffed, even on a crucial 4th-and-1. The weirdest calls go the wrong way. Hope is put on the shelf until next season.
Rams 30, Cowboys 22.
The Cowboys, with some of the NFL’s best young talent and two division titles in three years, might believe they can envision a championship run from here. Until proved otherwise, what a mirage.
“We can grow, and we have to learn from our experiences,” coach Jason Garrett contended.
Here’s a real-time reality check: The divisional round of the playoffs is Dallas’ glass ceiling.
For the third time in five years, the Cowboys have been good enough to find themselves in the second round of the playoffs, one win from the NFC title game. Once again, this is the end of the line. Two years ago as a No. 1 seed, they were eliminated by a last-minute dagger from Aaron Rodgers. Before that, it was the Dez Bryant catch that wasn’t. Now it’s Los Angeles’ two-headed rushing monster, Todd Gurley and C.J. Anderson, as the symbol of doom.
With Gurley and Anderson both cracking triple-digits, Los Angeles rushed for 273 yards — most in playoff history for the Rams, most in playoff history against the Cowboys — to flip the script for what might have been.
Wasn’t it the Rams’ D that was supposed to have the problems stopping the run? Los Angeles allowed an NFL-worst 5.1 yards per carry during the season. But with former Cowboys coach Wade Phillips crafting the scheme as defensive coordinator, the Rams held the NFL’s rushing champ to 47 yards, 2.4 per carry. Meanwhile, the Rams’ high-flying offense, with the fancy passing game creations of young wizard Sean McVay, suddenly found a new identity especially for this moment.
You might think that McVay, at 32 the league’s youngest coach, is the NFL’s version of Harry Potter, given his magic touch for scheming open receivers. Well, on Saturday night, McVay turned into Ground Chuck, and the Cowboys had no answers to slow down a Rams’ running game that was reminiscent of the run-first system that Chuck Knox employed for the Rams in the 1970s.
The Rams ran on a season-high 48 attempts while Jared Goff threw just 28 passes. Of course, there was the McVay touch to all of the ground work, as the Rams repeatedly used the so-called “jet-action,” typically fake end-arounds or “ghost sweeps” that threw Dallas’ defense for a loop.
“The reality of it is they’re a team that (uses) a lot of shifts and motions, and they can get your eyes,” Cowboys linebacker Jaylon Smith told USA TODAY as he left the Coliseum. “You have to be locked in and queued into your key. That’s something that got the best of us tonight.”
Add it to the list of lessons the Cowboys need to learn from. Dallas had the NFL’s fifth-best run defense during the season, but the unit looked like a shell of that Saturday.
You heard that by listening to Kris Richard, the highly regarded assistant who calls the defensive plays for the Cowboys. He sounded disgusted when someone asked him if the run fits were out of sync.
“If a team is running the ball, we’re not fitting correctly,” Richard said. “It’s as simple as us getting out cleats in the grass as doing things correctly.”
Maybe the Cowboys will learn from this. Perhaps they can make schematic adjustments. Maybe the intensity will go up a notch. Like every team, there will be personnel tweaks here or there.
Just to get to this point represents a sign that they have something decent to build on. The Cowboys were 3-5 in No- vember but emerged as one of the hottest teams in the NFL down the stretch, with Amari Cooper’s presence showing how much more capable Dak Prescott can be as a thrower, with Elliott and with the scrappy defense featuring Smith and rookie Leighton Vander Esch (the young linebackers often lost in space on Saturday night).
And they never quit on their oftenembattled coach, Garrett, who has won two playoff games in his eight full seasons at the helm but has hardly lost his team. They didn’t bail on Garrett when the season seemed lost at the halfway point and they kept clawing on Saturday night when it appeared the game was on the verge of becoming a blowout.
“I don’t question our effort, our toughness, our fight,” Garrett said. “Those guys put it all out there and it inspires me.”
Garrett, like Smith, Richard and others, compared the setback to a scar that can heal over time.
“It hardens you,” Richard said. “What do scars do? Either they wound you and send you away, or every time you look at a wound, it’s a reminder that they can’t break you.”
Maybe so. But the Cowboys were in this spot two years ago and grew only so much from that. They learned enough to get right back to the divisional round … only to fall flat again.
Perhaps that’s why Garrett cringed as he walked up the ramp leading to the team buses when it was suggested that his young team, which came to Los Angeles with just two players over 30, could be in the process of taking incremental steps to an eventual championship level.
He knows. The future is now. Projecting what happens next year or the year after that is risky business. Being next year’s champion is no kind of glory. That’s why Garrett urged his players after they clinched their division crown in December to embrace an urgent mission was to win it all now.
Well, the Cowboys failed again in that regard.
They are going home again, with this generation of Dallas players doing no better than their predecessors when it comes to breaking through their glass ceiling. Dallas hasn’t won a Super Bowl since XXX, following the 1995 season, which also happens to be the last time the Cowboys won in the divisional round, too.
Maybe they will indeed learn from their fresh scar. But there’s no promise they’ll get back to the divisional round any time soon, which is why the opportunity must be seized when presented.
That lesson needs to be the biggest takeaway for the Cowboys in the wake of another sad ending.