The Cowboys have seen the Aaron Rodgers’ show. They admire it but don’t like it. In fact, they’d like to cancel it.
“Can I say the F word?” Cowboys defensive lineman David Irving said. “It’s really hard. That guy is awesome at what he does. It takes everybody to stop one guy. It’s tough; it’s tough. He gets out. . . . I don’t know how he does it. It’s extremely hard, and we have to get better at it.
“I always feel like I could have done more. I don’t like losing. Maybe it was that missed tackle, maybe it was pressure I should have got. Losing is never fun.”
In the 2014 postseason, Rodgers ran out the final 4:06 on a nine-play drive that ended in victory formation after Dez Bryant’s controversial fourth-down non-catch. It included a clutch 12-yard throw to Randall Cobb on third-and-11.
In a divisional playoff game at AT&T Stadium on Jan. 15, Mason Crosby kicked a 51-yard field goal as time expired to give the Packers a 34-31 victory. Rodgers led Green Bay on a six-play, 42-yard drive after the Cowboys tied the game with 35 seconds left. It included Rodgers buying time and then throwing a 35-yard pass to Jared Cook along the sideline with three seconds left.
On Sunday, the Cowboys took a 31-28 lead with 1:13 left on an 11-yard touchdown run by Dak Prescott only to see it disappear with 11 seconds remaining. Rodgers hit Davante Adams with a 12-yard pass for the game-winner, completing a nine-play, 75-yard drive.
“There’s a reason why he’s one of the best. It showed tonight,” middle linebacker Jaylon Smith said.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones admits he was hoping for overtime after the Cowboys had taken a three-point lead. He knew the Cowboys left Rodgers too much time.
“I thought that we’ve got to hold them to a field goal,” Jones said. “I did not think they could get a touchdown in that period of time. We had played well enough defensively to do that.”
Prescott’s run came on third-and-two, so he could have slid down at the 1-yard line and given the Cowboys a chance to run clock. However, the Cowboys, down by four points, had no guarantee they would have scored a touchdown if Prescott had given himself up before reaching the end zone.
“You can second-guess every little aspect of it,” Jones said. “Certainly we’d have liked to have given him the ball back with 10 seconds on the clock, no timeouts. But the only way to have really gotten that done is we wouldn’t have known for sure that we were going to get that touchdown. We know how that goes. That’s the height of revisiting, and I want to make that point. I don’t want to do that.”