They were down, given up for dead at home while losing to a team at the top of their conference. Then they surprised everyone by roaring back, winning the game on a field goal on the final play.
Wait, are we talking about the Cowboys here or the Kansas City Chiefs, their opponent Thursday afternoon? How did these two fall into the same category? Or I guess I should say, how did the Chiefs — participants in seven straight AFC title games and five of the last six Super Bowls — slide down to a level that the Cowboys just managed to rise up to gain? If Kansas City’s 6-5 record is a stunner this time of year, Dallas sitting at 5-5-1 after where this club was following the loss to Arizona is equally shocking.
Both teams are currently outside the playoff picture, fighting to gain entrance. The Chiefs are one game behind Jacksonville, the Los Angeles Chargers and Buffalo, all sitting at 7-4 as the AFC’s wild cards of the moment. And the big problem is Kansas City has already lost to all three. They will host the Chargers in a rematch in a couple of weeks, but those losses to the Bills and Jaguars could be killers if they amount to tiebreakers for the playoffs.
Beyond that, though, the Chiefs are riding high with a 23-20 overtime win after trailing the Colts, who entered Sunday 8-2, by a 20-9 count early in the fourth quarter. Then Patrick Mahomes did the stuff he has always done, Kareem Hunt soared through the air and suddenly Harrison Butker was putting away a desperately needed Chiefs victory. Despite the 6-5 record, the Chiefs have outscored opponents by a plus-76, more than any team in the AFC besides the Colts and New England. Kansas City remains a serious team at all times.
Cowboys
The Cowboys became one Sunday afternoon. Yes, they have beaten the Eagles before in AT&T Stadium. They do it quite a lot, in fact. But they haven’t spotted Philadelphia a 21-point lead before initiating a comeback in any of those previous victories. As long as the Cowboys had the worst-ranked defense in the NFL, this team was going nowhere. The rankings will continue to suffer because those performances from the first half of the season are like scars on the permanent record.
But the Cowboys got much steadier pressure on Jalen Hurts than the vaunted Eagles’ defense did against Dak Prescott. The final stats may show just one sack apiece, but the one by Osa Odighizuwa for a 13-yard loss on the Eagles’ last possession swung the outcome of the game. Even before that, Hurts seemed to have a regular target on the Cowboys’ bench as he was pressured out of the pocket and forced to throw incompletions out of bounds time and again as the Eagles went scoreless the final 41 minutes.
Since the trade for defensive tackle Quinnen Williams and the return of DeMarvion Overshown, along with some other shuffling in Matt Eberflus’ challenged unit, the Cowboys have given up 16 and 21 points to two wildly different opponents — maybe the worst team in the AFC along with the defending Super Bowl champs.
If they play the Chiefs and the Lions and the Chargers and keep those opponents’ totals in the 21 range instead of the 31 they were averaging before the bye week, then Dallas has a chance in all of those games. I’m not forecasting a four-game winning streak coming out of Detroit. I’m just mentioning that no one was going to consider the Cowboys a viable wild-card contender as long as the defense was getting shredded for close to 400 yards.
And the biggest change of all has happened overnight. Ashton Jeanty, the talented Raiders rookie from Frisco, goes six carries for seven yards. Saquon Barkley, the defending rushing champ having a down season for him, goes 10 carries for 22 yards.
“That’s two weeks in a row the other team hasn’t really tried to run against us,” head coach Brian Schottenheimer said. It’s a head-shaking revelation, when you think about Rico Dowdle going 30 for 183 not so long ago.
“They’ve played really, really well and you can see the confidence in the entire group,” Schottenheimer said. “And when it’s all said and done, after 17 games, we’re going to either be in the playoffs or we’re not. But if we keep playing the way we’re playing right now, I like our chances. We play a lot of the teams that are ahead of us and we’ll see how it goes.”
Actually, Detroit is the only NFC team ahead of the Cowboys remaining on the schedule. Schottenheimer might have been thinking about Minnesota but three straight losses have sent the Vikings the other direction. But the Kansas City game means about as much as any because the Cowboys are not in a position to lose games, inter-conference or otherwise.
It’s an unlikely position in which the Chiefs find themselves. For seven years, it has been simply a matter of would they win the AFC Championship Game or not. Five times the answer was yes. Now the Chiefs have to do the kind of digging just to make the playoffs they have never really needed in Mahomes’ time.
The Cowboys are here to hand them a shovel Thursday, say happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the club.
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