Tuesday, November 19, 1996

Packers ponder their defeat at Dallas - Again

By DALE HOFMANN / The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Nov. 19, 1996)

IRVING, Texas - Not yet. Not even close.

The Green Bay Packers came to Texas Monday night planning to make the Dallas Cowboys obsolete. After three years of going in circles, they were ready to turn the corner.

Undisputed new kings of pigskins. America's team.

The trouble this time was the Dallas defense turned the Green Bay offense into Somalia's team. There's always something.

Seven visits to Texas Stadium in the Mike Holmgren regime. Seven losses and this one more damaging than any of the others.

This one came with no scapegoats, no consolation and no convenient explanations.

It wasn't the stadium. Playing the way they did Monday night, the Cowboys would have beaten the Packers just as convincingly on a frozen Fox River. The schedule didn't sack Brett Favre four times. The venue wasn't the villain in a 254-yard total offensive effort.

It wasn't Jerry Jones' money, the Cowboys' holding or the officials' failing eyesight.

It wasn't the injuries, either, although they certainly didn't help. With relative newcomers on the business end of his favorite routes, Favre spent most of the night like a man stalled on a railroad track fumbling for his keys.

Any time he nets just 22 yards passing in an entire half, he's either throwing left-handed or playing in Dallas. No question, Robert Brooks, Antonio Freeman and Mark Chmura would have eased his pain but they wouldn't have prevented the Packers' demise.

"We had all those guys last year in the championship game and they beat us," Holmgren pointed out.

Besides, the Cowboys have had hurts of their own. But the Packers aren't the Cowboys. Not yet. No matter how much their fiercest friends want them to be.

In fact, at the moment these are teams headed in distinctly different directions. Green Bay has lost two straight games. Dallas has won six of its last seven.

Mathematically, the Cowboys had to have this one but maybe not as much as the Packers needed it psychologically. The only way they're ever going to know they can beat this club is to do it.

And they need to do it whether they admit it or not.

Holmgren disputed that notion with a straight face, but then Holmgren would be a mean man in a poker game. Yes, he was disappointed but he tried to make the magnitude of this match sound like a public relations stunt.

"It's one game on our schedule," he said. "It's the 11th one and we've got five left. Each game has its own little thrills and we play them one at a time.

"The fact that we haven't won down here makes it an interesting story."

"War and Peace" is an interesting story. This is becoming an epic tale of frustration and, in most of greater Wisconsin, outright despair.

But the players hold to the party line laid out by their leader.

"If you target just one game," veteran defensive lineman Sean Jones said, "you stand a very good chance of being 1-15. We're 8-3."

And the Cowboys are 7-4, which suddenly makes them too close for comfort as the Packers try to cling grimly to their hopes for home-field advantage in the playoffs.

The post-season is the only place these teams can meet again and they won't be any fonder of each other the next time around. Particularly after the Cowboys sparked a scuffle with an unnecessary final field goal.

"I was upset by that," Reggie White said, "but there's nothing you can do about it. That's not important. They won. They beat us and that's what it all boils down to."

It always does.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)