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| In the first game of October (Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the NFL) the Cowboys hosted the Bears on Monday Night Football on ESPN |
Some people would look at the 34-18 final score of last
night’s Monday Night game and assume that the Bears played a complete game, the
kind of game we expected them to be capable of heading into this season but had
yet to see.
I saw something very different in watching the game. I saw
the Cowboys have opportunity after opportunity to move the ball and stay in the
game. Then I saw the Dallas receivers let down their quarterback (neither of
the first two interceptions Tony Romo were his fault) with more dropped passes
than I care to count.
What do you expect a quarterback to do when his receivers
are failing and the other team is running away from you at Mach 1? Down by two
touchdowns heading into the fourth quarter and feeling like you have nobody on
your offense you can rely on has to be a hopeless feeling. I’m glad I wasn’t in
Romo’s position; I’m a fighter, but even I might have packed up and turned in
for the night in that situation.
Romo fought through, but he was panicked. He saw open
receivers, but they weren’t as open as he thought. He made some poor decisions
and threw three more interceptions that are his fault, at least mostly. But
even I, a Redskins fan who very much dislikes the Cowboys, who has hated on
‘Tony Homo’ for as long as he’s been a starter in Big D, cannot fault Romo
fully for those those three additional picks.
I have a feeling that, had his receivers not proved to be so
unreliable and the game gotten so out of reach, Tony would have made better
decisions. Of course he would have! He would not have felt the pressure to
bring the team back by himself. A quarterback like the Mike Vick of old, or
like RGIII, or even Aaron Rodgers, might not feel the same pressure Romo did
because if a pass isn’t there, they can make a play with their legs. Tony Romo
is not that style of quarterback.
Dez Bryant has been beyond disappointing this year. Props to
Jason Witten for fighting through his spleen injury, but he has been dropping
too many passes this season. Miles Austin has been reliable, but the Cowboys
have yet to game plan around him, and I’m not sure I can explain why; I need a
Cowboys fan to do that for me.
But in all this I’ve been focused on the Cowboys’ offensive
woes. To be fair, their defense was pretty putrid last night, too. Before I get
into that, though, I do have to give credit to the Bears defense. Even though
they didn’t really have to fight for any of Romo’s five interceptions, they
still had to catch the ball and that deserves a bit of credit. Yet I still
hesitate to give them too much credit because the best player on the Cowboys
last night was Brian Moorman, the punter. When you don’t have to defend against
anything, how much praise have you really earned?
On to the Cowboys defense, oh where do I begin? They sacked
Cutler twice, but outside of that didn’t really put him under too much duress
after the first quarter. The Cowboys, on 14 carries, were tackled behind the
line of scrimmage four times. They were only able to return the favor once, and the Bears rushed twice as many times as
Dallas did!
Perhaps the most important failure was that Dallas didn’t
make the Bears drive on them (both of Chicago’s offensive touchdowns came from
30+ yards away and the Bears gained 8 fewer first downs than the Cowboys did
over the course of the whole game). Chicago had just one drive in which they
made it into the red zone and they had to settle for a field goal. Had Dallas
forced the Bears to sustain more drives and get down into a shorter field,
perhaps this game would have been closer.
But the game really isn’t as close as the score suggests.
Kyle Orton relieved Romo late in the game and threw a garbage-time touchdown
pass to Jason Witten. Then Dez Bryant was on the receiving end of the two-point
conversion. Chicago won this by four possessions as far as I’m concerned.
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