Comeback Cowboys Burn Falcons - And Jimmy Johnson
ARLINGTON - “Dak Prescott is a very good quarterback,” former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson said Monday on FS1’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd.” “But as far as letting him go and just drop back and read the field, and make a lot of decisions, that’s not his game.
"(Prescott's Cowboys) are at their best,'' continued the FOX Sports analyst Johnson, "when they are taking the lead, pounding the football, rushing the passer. But playing from behind, or even in a tight game, is not their game.”
Oops.
In fairness to Hall-of-Famer Jimmy, the recent numbers going into Sunday's highly-improbably 40-39 Cowboys win over Atlanta here at AT&T Stadium supported his claim. Very early in Dak's career, he continued a Tony Romo-keyed trend of the Cowboys being able to win in "clutch time''; the were 18-7 in one-score games (with a margin of eight or fewer points) from 2016 to 2018.
READ MORE: Cowboys 40, Falcons 39: McCarthy's Magicians
READ MORE: 10 'Whitty' Observations' On Most Improbable Win Ever
But between last year and last week (a 20-17 flop at the Rams)? Dallas dropped to 1-7 in that department.
And Sunday? The way this game unfolded, Atlanta - up 20-0 to start the game and still up by 15 with just over five minutes left - Dallas wouldn't have to worry about losing in "clutch time.''
The worry would be about getting blown out on the way to 0-2.
After all, Dallas hadn't forged a rebound when down in the first quarter by 14 points in 13 years. And the Cowboys were 1-13 in the last 20 seasons when trailing by 14 or more points in the first quarter.
And it's not just the Cowboys; going into Sunday, NFL teams had lost 235 straight games when trailing by 15-plus points with 5:15 left in fourth quarters. Furthermore, in the last 20 years, teams that led by 15 points or more in the final five minutes of NFL had a combined record of 1,875-6.
And then ... everything that Jimmy Johnson believed turned out wrong.
Prescott's numbers (34 of 47 through the air for 450 yards and a touchdown, becoming the first QB in NFL history to record three rushing touchdowns with more than 400 passing yards) were record-setting. His battered O-line held up well enough to allow his weaponry (both CeeDee Lamb and Amari Cooper each recorded more than 100 receiving yards, fill-in tight end Dalton Schultz had 88 yards on nine receptions and bull-dozing Ezekiel Elliott had 89 yards and a score on 22 carries) to shine, and kicker Greg Zuerlein followed his clever spinning onside kick (recovered by special-teams ace C.J. Goodwin) with a game-winning at-the-gun 46-yard field goal.
Dazzling Dallas scored 16 points in the final 5:02 of the game to grab the win.
“We weren’t supposed to win it,'' Elliott said. "We weren’t supposed to win that game.''
Jimmy Johnson agrees. Or, at least, he used to.
