'Hot & Spicy!' Cowboys Locker Room Reflects On NFL Season: A 'Messed-Up Feeling!'
It wasn't supposed to end like this for the Dallas Cowboys. Everything was set up for Dallas to slay the youthful Green Bay Packers and then have a shot in the Divisional Round, a game that would have also been at AT&T Stadium.
The path to that elusive NFC Championship game was set.
But alas, the Cowboys didn't get the memo as they were curb-stomped by the Packers, who devastatingly stole Dallas' soul in a 48-32 win.
With Dallas clinching the NFC East a week prior, being on a two-game winning streak, and playing at a venue they were undefeated in during their last 16 games, everything was pointing to a Cowboys win.
Which is what made the brutal capitulation even harder to stomach.
“It's a messed-up feeling,” receiver KaVontae Turpin said on the loss. “Everybody around here frustrated because we weren't supposed to lose, but you know that’s just the National Football League.”
That is the nature of football. On any given Sunday, if a team isn't in the right frame of mind, bad things can happen. Dallas played with its food and paid the ultimate price.
Packers quarterback Jordan Love sliced and diced Dan Quinn's defense in a brutal first half of football that saw him complete 13 of his 16 passes for 185 yards and a touchdown en route to a 27-7 lead.
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On the game's first drive, Love orchestrated a 16-play, 67-yard touchdown drive that sucked the air out of AT&T Stadium, with Turpin having a unique way of describing what unfolded on Sunday.
“Green Bay came in hot and spicy,” he said. “They just stayed with it, we couldn’t stop them and that’s just how the league is, you start hot, you always finish hot.”
The Packers weren't just hot, they went supernova on Dallas as they hung 48 points on a team that hadn't lost in that building since Week 1 of last season.
Now, the Cowboys must pick up the pieces of their shattered season and move forward with a host of questions surrounding the head coach, quarterback, and every other member of the football department.
There have been brutal losses over the years, but this feels different. It was all set up for this Dallas team to finally show that it was different than the ones before it and there was a sense that it was.
And as such, it all adds up to a "messed-up feeling" about what could have been.
