Monday, October 21, 1996

Cowboys were lucky to win Sunday
By LANCE FLEMING
Staff Writer
(Oct. 21, 1996)

IRVING - Put plain and simple, the Cowboys got lucky Sunday.

They got lucky that their opponent was an Atlanta team that doesn't know how to win games.
They got lucky that the Falcons busted a coverage late in the game.

And they got lucky that Atlanta couldn't score touchdowns and instead had to settle for field goals.

They're lucky they walked out of Texas Stadium with a 32-28 win over Atlanta, because if they had lost to fall to 3-4, you could have kissed the season goodbye.

But the Cowboys are just lucky enough right now to have beaten a winless Atlanta team that should have won Sunday.

Not good enough; lucky enough.

"(Our play) concerns me, sure it does," Dallas safety Darren Woodson said. "We need to start playing up to our potential, and right now we're playing down to the competition."

But why?

Everyone thought that when Michael Irvin returned the Cowboys would get on a roll offensively and begin playing like the Cowboys of the last three or four years.

It hasn't happened, though.

Yes Dallas put up 32 points Sunday, but there were still long offensive lapses where the offense was very stagnant. And the running game, once the catalyst for the offense, managed just 56 yards against an Atlanta defense that entered the game allowing an average of 119.5 per game.

Emmitt Smith carried the ball a meager 15 times for 50 yards, a count that frustrated guard Nate Newton.

"How many carries did Emmitt have? Fifteen?" he asked. "Man, that's bull--. I thought we'd run it more in this game, but I'm just a player, man, and I do what I'm told. But I always want to run it more. I thought we'd get more carries than that."

No one in the Cowboy locker room was kidding himself about the outcome of Sunday's game.
They all knew that playing the way they did Sunday will get them nowhere.

"Right now we're playing about how our record suggests," cornerback Kevin Smith said. "We're 4-3 and that sums up where are right now."

Cowboy quarterback Troy Aikman, who sets the mood for the team, said there's no doubt his team is scuffling.

"We've struggled; there's no question about that," he said. "The reason we didn't score many points last week (in a 17-3 win over Arizona) is because we didn't have any big plays in the passing game. The other games we've been out of sync.

"We're at 4-3, and we've dug ourselves a hole that we're trying to get out of," he said. "We can't afford to lose any game, whether it's Atlanta or Miami or whoever."

Oh, yes, Miami.

The Cowboys have to get their house in order pretty quickly, because next Sunday in the Sunshine State they begin the most critical stretch of their season against the Dolphins. Following that game will be games against Philadelphia, at San Francisco and Green Bay.

We'll all know exactly where this Cowboy team is headed in one month.

"Hopefully we'll come of it with some wins," Woodson said. "We've got some under our belts, and I think we'll have some confidence going into it. But we haven't put four quarters together yet."

And the Cowboys are going to have to do that if they intend to win three or four of those games and make up ground on Green Bay for home-field advantage.

"We're the dog at the track and the rabbit is running," Dallas wide receiver Michael Irvin said. "Did you see the rabbit Monday night (in the Packers' win over San Francisco)? The rabbit is running."
And the Cowboys have to catch it.

But performances like Sunday's won't help, even though the Cowboys did escape with a win.

"There aren't a lot of easy games," Aikman said. "I sensed that this would be a tough game. Atlanta has always played us tough. I don't think we went in thinking it would be easy. And we made enough plays to get out with a win."

Just as luck would have it.

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