There is one more game left to be played in the NFL’s Super Wild Card Weekend, but the Cardinals and Rams’ Monday Night tilt was secondary news in the world of NFL takery because the Dallas Cowboys provided an almost unbelievable number of topics to discuss coming out of a dismal six-point loss to the San Francisco 49ers.
The Cowboys awful performance was stunningly complete in terms of who shared the blame, from the coaching staff through most of the team (with some notable exceptions, of course), as there were questionable coaching decisions and an abundance of self-inflicted mistakes and penalties on both sides of the ball, headlined by a catastrophic final sequence that saw Dallas fail to execute a QB draw with 14 seconds left to set up one shot at a game-winning touchdown.
After the game, Dak Prescott took aim at the officials, as did Mike McCarthy, but few pundits were willing to agree that the Cowboys failure fell on the officials shoulders in the same way that seemingly everyone agreed the game between the Raiders and Bengals was tainted by dreadful calls and officiating blunders. Instead, the focus was on the errors and lack of discipline, and no one reveled in this more than the world’s No. 1 Cowboy hater, Stephen A. Smith.
Smith posted his immediate reaction to Twitter on Sunday, but that was just an amuse bouche for what was to come on Monday, because as has been the case all season, Smith was joined by Cowboys legend Michael Irvin on First Take, who could only sit there and watch as Smith took victory lap after victory lap, calling Dallas an “utter disgrace,” and even blaming Irvin for being so quick to embrace and crown a team that hadn’t won yet.
.@stephenasmith is the happiest man in the world after the Cowboys' playoff L 😂
“This franchise is an utter disgrace!” pic.twitter.com/2GiJTFcDtx
— First Take (@FirstTake) January 17, 2022
Smith wasn’t done torturing Irvin at that point, as they then ran a 40-second montage of sad Cowboys fans that CBS cut to throughout the game while Stephen A. cackled.
https://twitter.com/FirstTake/status/1483152357898784772
I’m not sure Smith could’ve scripted a Dallas playoff game that would’ve created more opportunities for him to revel in the Cowboys’ collective misery, from the comedy of errors and penalties to Dak and McCarthy trying to blame officials to the fact that even the most ardent of Dallas supporters at ESPN couldn’t muster up much in the way of a defense for that performance. Smith is going to live off of this for the entire week and, probably, much of next offseason and the lead up to the 2022 regular season.
