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Monday Night is different than most nights

By Bob Ford

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

(KRT)

IRVING, Texas - In the parking lots of Texas Stadium, where people and trucks, both of the 4x4 variety, were lined up to make their final exits Monday night, the end of the football game was being called a miracle.

In the locker room of the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, it was called something entirely different.

Unnatural. That would have been a good description.

And although it is difficult to see on this bloody morning, when the Eagles and their fans have two weeks to digest what happened Monday night, the news for the home team wasn't terribly good, either.

The Cowboys won the game, with a final minute that still defies belief, but the first 59 minutes held nothing but bad tidings for Dallas.

They were coming off a loss that should have awakened them. Against the Eagles, however, the Cowboys continued to doze.

Maybe this is the real comeuppance for the Cowboys, the harshest sentence for the crimes they did and didn't commit in their braying heyday.

Without their weekly crisis to serve as motivation, the Cowboys have drifted into the bland sameness of the NFL. There aren't any games in which they can simply throw their shiny hats onto the field and quake the opposition.

America's Team looked more like Switzerland's Team Monday night. Having lived through several seasons in the cauldron, the Cowboys appear unable to operate without that kind of heat.

They did win the game, however. They get their own two-week break to heave a sigh of relief. But this doesn't look like a team capable of running off with the division as it has in the past. Even though the Eagles are 0-2 in the NFC East, this is a race that will be won in the final laps.

In the absence of players being hauled off to jail, and the oppressive attention that creates, the Cowboys have to generate their own intensity.

Based on the last two weeks - a second-half fade against Arizona and a first-half no-show against the Eagles - Dallas has a bad generator, not to mention a porous defense.

Going into Monday night, it was the Cowboys' offense that caused the most concern in these parts.

"We're not the team we've been in the past, where we've been able to overcome a third-and-14 or a second-and-15 situation as if it's not a big hurdle," quarterback Troy Aikman said last week.

With an aging and aching Emmitt Smith, playing despite bruised ribs Monday night, Aikman needs to find Michael Irvin with greater regularity.

But longer routes require more time, and both the Cards and the Eagles blitzed Aikman constantly to take away that time.

Those problems were magnified by a fired-up Eagles team bent on proving that its win over Green Bay wasn't some sort of mirage that would disappear quickly.

In the first half, the Cowboys wasted good field position and looked wilted on an evening in which the heavy air sat on their shoulders like an overcoat.

But as tenuous as the offense seemed, with Aikman waiting for the next blind-side hit to separate him from the ball, it was the Dallas defense that turned in the most ordinary performance.

When you think of a Cowboys defense, you don't imagine it giving up 105 yards rushing in the first half alone. But that is what Ricky Watters and Charlie Garner piled up, pushing past a depleted front four that has only one holdover from the Super Bowl championship team of two seasons ago.

On another day, that might not have been so bad. But the Cowboys couldn't afford to get into a ball-control game while they trailed.

Two fumbles led directly to 10 points for the Eagles. Even though the Eagles' offense had only one decent drive of which to speak, it was enough to establish a tentative dominance and an 11-point halftime lead.

As always, this would be a game of turnovers, and the Cowboys' bend-but-don't-pull-anything defense didn't seem capable of forcing a big play. The linebackers had to worry about making tackles on Watters and Garner and couldn't freelance into the passing lanes. The defensive backs had their hands full contending with the routes of Irving Fryar and Michael Timpson, even if Ty Detmer rarely got the ball that wide.

Stretched thin, the Cowboys could only hold onto the game instead of grab it by the throat like they have in the past.

Holding on proved to be good enough, but it shouldn't have been. Five field goals brought the Cowboys to within 20-15 with 5 minutes, 25 seconds to play, but that should have been as close as they got.

A missed call by an official kept alive the Cowboys drive that put them ahead for the first time. And then came the incredible sight of holder Tom Hutton dropping a perfect snap on what should have been the winning field-goal attempt by Chris Boniol.

Settling for all those field goals should have added up to too little for the Cowboys. On most nights it would have. Monday night, however, was not most nights.

"Those three points add up," Aikman said as he prepared for this game. "What you want to make sure of is that you don't get too stressed and start panicking. I read that 15 teams didn't score a touchdown last week. Hey, we're no different than anybody else."

And that's really the point now. The Cowboys aren't any different.

Remember that on this bloody morning. The Cowboys are just another team, and it is going to be a long season.

Yes, that's true. It already "has" been a long season.

(c) 1997, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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