Cowboys Lay an Egg at Lambeau

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- You could smell this game as far away as Madison, and the part of it that stunk the worst was the Dallas Cowboys offense. On an afternoon in which everybody -- the officials, the head coaches, the offensive lines...everybody -- seemed to be conspiring to set the game of football back 40 years, it was the Cowboys who came up the smallest, committing 10 penalties and converting just 3 of 12 third downs in a 17-7 loss to the Packers at Lambeau Field.

"This was an impressive win for Green Bay," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. "But it was unimpressive the way we didn't execute, especially early, when we still had a chance to get the game going the way we wanted it to go."

But the most disappointing part for the Cowboys was that, by losing this game, they blew a very real chance to get the season going the way they wanted it to go.

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Dallas came in having won four in a row and claiming first place in the NFC East, a division nobody seems to want. Lining up against the Packers, who'd allowed a league-high 37 sacks and just last week became the first team this year to lose to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Cowboys appeared poised to continue their roll and move to 7-2. With the Eagles losing in San Diego, they'd have had a full two-game division lead and could have made a case for themselves among the NFC's elite, along with Minnesota and New Orleans.

Instead, they slipped on a penalty flag or eight and fell right back to the parity pack.

"You've got to play better than that," Dallas tight end Jason Witten said. "Our defense actually played pretty well, but as an offense, we let them down. How many plays did we have in the first half? Twenty-five? That's not enough."

If you somehow managed to stay awake through the first half Sunday, didn't know anything about the two teams but what you'd seen in that brutal first 30 minutes, and somebody had asked you, "Which of these teams lost to previously winless Tampa Bay last week?", you'd probably have said the team with the stars on their helmets. The Cowboys were awful. They were 0 of 5 on third downs in the first half, possessing the ball for just 11:10 and running a mere 21 plays (sorry, Jason) to Green Bay's 36.


And it's not as if the Packers were setting the world on fire during this time. Green Bay committed seven penalties and was just 2-for-8 on third down in the first half, and only a last-second Mason Crosby field goal prevented what would have been a perfectly justified scoreless halftime tie. The Packers' offensive line was as Camembert-soft as advertised, and the Cowboys' defenders harassed Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers all day. There was more than enough incompetence to go around, including a cornucopia of it by Jeff Triplette and an officiating crew that called phantom penalties and couldn't figure out when the Cowboys and Packers were and weren't allowed to use their replay challenges.

But Dallas couldn't rise above the morass of mediocrity. On the rare occasions when Dallas actually possessed the ball, the Cowboys' own line wasn't able to keep Tony Romo from getting flattened. The most astounding stat of the game may be that the Cowboys yielded more sacks (5) than did the Packers (4).

"We let our defense stay out there and stay out there and stay out there," Jones said. "It was very disappointing, and a reminder to everyone that all these teams have very good athletes and very good players."

The Cowboys are still a good team, of course. They remain in first place, and as we begin to size up the playoff picture, there are reasons to like them better than teams like the Eagles, Giants, Falcons and even the Packers. But what they lost Sunday, in addition to a game, was the chance to puff out their chests and feel like they were somehow above that 5-4 fray. A win here, on the not-yet-frozen tundra, would have given the league reason to view them as a clear Super Bowl contender -- the kind of team that plans to play home games on those crucial January weekends.

And while they may yet be that, after losing this particular game, the Cowboys can consider themselves no better than one of many very similar NFC contenders.

"Just a minor hiccup," Cowboys linebacker Keith Brooking said confidently. "That's the way we have to look at it. We've bounced back from our losses in a very positive way this year, and hopefully that's what we do this week coming up."

Oh, it's there for them if they want it. Their upcoming schedule is fertile ground for a recovery -- home games against the Redskins (just three games back!!) and the Raiders before a road game against the reeling Giants. The Cowboys still have a chance to get back on the horse they rode into Lambeau Field on Sunday morning. They need to tighten up their line play, remember how good their running backs are and keep finding ways to minimize the damage the all-or-(usually)-nothing Roy Williams does with his dropped passes and sloppy route-running. They need to play with the confidence they showed over the previous four weeks -- the confidence of a team that knows it's good and dares those stuck in the middle of the pack to try and stop it. They can do it.

It's just that, if they'd actually won this game Sunday -- which they very well could and should have -- that would have been a whole lot easier for them.