You Can't Put Jaxson Dart Behind This O-Line

Success is a derivative of humility, and over roughly the past decade of NFL football, no rivalry has diminished in prestige as much as the Cowboys versus the Giants. A few years ago, I went so far as to make a public call to ban staging this contest after 4 p.m. ET. One franchise became a vampiric private equity parody of itself while the other has taken so many horrifically bad—yet earnest—home run swings to dig itself out of roster hell that any player with a modicum of skill is forcefully buried beneath the worst offensive line in the sport (which is evident when those players leave and turn into the modern equivalent of Bo Jackson or Randall Cunningham on other rosters). 

So, it’s safe to say that the first season since 2005 in which a Giants-Cowboys tilt in Dallas was played at noon CT began with low expectations only to prove that, finally beyond its pretenses, the matchup can be absolutely beautiful if left on its own. 

In a game that featured five lead changes in the fourth quarter alone and used every second of the overtime clock, consider in bullet points all of which took place: 

• Giants left tackle James Hudson committed four penalties on the team’s opening drive alone, including one pass set where, instead of anchoring into position, he literally spread his legs and power slapped Cowboys defensive end James Houston in the head. He was benched after the Giants milked nearly the first 10 minutes of the game off the clock, converted a third-and-25 and logged a field goal. 

• Rookie Jaxson Dart was finally inserted into the game, only to serve as a decoy for an absolutely pitch-perfect designer play call in which the Giants inverted a counter-read play they ran for Wilson earlier in the game. Wilson kept the ball when he was in and Dart gave the ball to Cam Skattebo, whom fans had been desperate to see utilized as an actual part of the game plan, for a massive gain. 

• Even with Dart making his first appearance, Wilson threw for 450 yards and three touchdowns, arguably the second-best statistical game of his career behind a four-touchdown, 452-yard performance in a 2017 Seahawks win over the Texans. It was one of the best statistical performances by a Giants quarterback … ever. All of Wilson’s touchdown passes traveled at least 29 yards in the air, two of them were to Malik Nabers after Nabers started the game with the body language of a hangry sixth-grader, and one of them took place with less than a minute to play, with the Giants trailing by four points. Matt Eberflus, now the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator, beautifully reprised his role as the defensive architect of Jayden Daniels’s Hail Mary last season. 

• Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer was so confident that Brandon Aubrey was going to tie the game on a 60-plus-yard field goal as time expired in regulation that he did not throw the ball on the down prior, instead handing the ball off to Javonte Williams. And … he was correct to do so.

All this to say that, while nothing really changes—neither of these teams seriously look like playoff contenders, and the Cowboys traded away the best defensive player in football three weeks ago and just replaced him with Jadeveon Clowney—the game can begin to springboard from rock bottom in the way that a Western Kentucky–Hawaii game is enjoyable after enough THC inhalation. The Cowboys are certainly resilient and borderline likeable if the owner is cropped out of the picture frame. The Giants, when throwing common sense to the wind and fully committing to the idea that nearly every play needs to be a vertical shot to Nabers or a rumbling handoff to Skattebo, can morph into a team that is, for the first time in more than a decade, consistently watchable. 

Any of this is better than pretending, the way we once did, that this game would mean something other than a cold, administrative bit of box checking necessary to satisfy all required divisional games played for some distant tiebreaking purposes for teams playing on another stratosphere of talent and competence. Tom Landry is gone. Hell, Tom Coughlin is gone. Hell, Dalvin Tomlinson is gone.

But from the detritus of what remains can come a game in which our experiences build from here. A game we actually enjoyed watching. A game that nearly every player and coach seemed to enjoy participating in. A game in which both announcers remained fully present and devoid of ear-splitting platitudes to fill the echoey silence in the stadium. 

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Cowboys and Giants Treated Us to an Unexpected Beauty.

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