$.01--It’s not often where one team definitively loses a game more than the opponent wins it in the postseason. Yet the nation got treated to the Dallas Cowboys slitting their own throats in a puzzling loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday night.

In what was billed as the marquee matchup of the Sunday slate, the Cowboys and 49ers took turns playing poorly and making far too many mistakes. Sure, the game was close--San Francisco won 23-17 after trying their darndest to squander a 13-0 lead. But for every dumb play call, mental lapse and penalty committed by the 49ers, and there were scads of all those, the Cowboys just had to one-up their guests from San Francisco.

Dallas deserved to lose because of how dumb they played. There’s no sugarcoating it. Even their own alleged home-field advantage blew up in their face; two drives were ruined when Cowboys receivers were blinded by the sunlight coming through the domed stadium and couldn’t see Dak Prescott’s throws. It was that kind of day for Dallas.

There were the penalties--14 of them called, at least that many ignored against the Cowboys’ offensive line too. A defensive holding call against Randy Gregory late in the game gave extra life to the 49ers. It was a pointless, mindless play by Gregory and a valid call. It cost them 11 seconds off the clock in a game where they needed every tick, tick, tick.

Mike McCarthy did not have a good game as Dallas’ coach. His team was not sharp, not prepared for what the 49ers were going to do. Even the biggest 49ers sycophants will tell you there isn’t much mystery to Kyle Shanahan’s team, they just try and out-execute you with their precise offense and physical defense. The Dallas defense was caught off-guard too many times to simply put the blame on the players. San Francisco deserves credit for making the plays early, but it should never have taken the 49ers scoring on their first four possessions before Dallas’ defense decided to try and defend them instead of just wildly reacting to every available stimulus.

On the controversial play at the end: the game was over. Every middle school coach in America knows the official has to touch the ball to spot it ready for play. The Cowboys line did not, however. It was an iffy call to have Prescott run the ball with no timeouts and already well within range of a non-Hail Mary throw for the potential game-winning TD. Not understanding the dynamics of the rules, that’s inexcusable from McCarthy, Prescott and the Dallas offense. It was the final nail in a self-constructed coffin where they kept giving the 49ers the hammer. San Francisco dropped it a few times but hammered home the road win.

$.02--The first-ever Monday Night Football playoff game was one I watched with great anticipation. The game between the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals carried extra significance for those of us who ally with the Detroit Lions.

Matthew Stafford never won a playoff game in his 12 seasons in Detroit. He should have won one in Dallas in 2014, but the officials decided otherwise. But this was Stafford’s chance to prove he could do it.

It was also a giant test for the thesis that the Rams were just a QB away from bigger and better things in the postseason. The Rams went all-in on winning this year, between mortgaging their draft future to Detroit to import Stafford (and exile Jared Goff) and bringing in Von Miller, Odell Beckham Jr. and others. Heck, they even coaxed Eric Weddle out of retirement to help shore up their injury-plagued secondary.

That was my baseline narrative going into Monday’s game. And all of that quickly became completely irrelevant once the game started. The Rams played like a team that can win this Super Bowl. The Cardinals looked a lot more like the team that the 3-13-1 Lions dominated in December.

Not to take one iota of credit away from the Rams, but this is what the Cardinals offered us in the first half offensively:

The massacre was on, and the Rams never really relented. Other than a scary injury to Cardinals safety Budda Baker, the second half was completely uneventful. That was a good game script for the Rams and a really damning one for Kliff Kingsbury and the Cardinals. Murray had a wretched game, one that had many people clamoring for Colt McCoy to replace him in the loss.

Arizona suffered the same fate as the 2020 Pittsburgh Steelers. They peaked early as the last NFL team to lose a game and then had nothing left once the rest of the good teams caught up. The Rams lapped them, exposing a lack of composure from Murray and a lack of adaptability from Kingsbury. This could be a game with a very long tail in Arizona.

Back to Stafford. He played very well. Even outrushed Murray. I’m happy for him and his vindication or validation or however it needs to be framed. It was his 186th start before winning his first career postseason win, the most by nearly a full season. It might not last to next week and a trip to Tampa Bay, but the elephant in the Stafford room walked away

$.03--I was on sports dad duty on Sunday and didn’t get in front of a television to watch the Buccaneers vs. Eagles until shortly after 2 p.m. ET. By that point, roughly midway through the second quarter, the Buccaneers had already effectively won the game. It was 17-0 Tampa Bay and the Eagles already had their wings clipped.

I stayed with the game. Another Jalen Hurts interception, another Eagles penalty to ruin a positive play, a too-easily-read perimeter play that forced yet another Philadelphia 3rd-and-long. The cycle kept repeating, like the basic drumming of every AC/DC song ever recorded. Hurts being panicked in the pocket was as predictable as Phil Rudd’s unflinchingly uninventive work pounding the skins.

It rolled to 24-0. Then 31-0. Hurts kept struggling and he was far from alone in that regard for the men in green. Other than a sweet Boston Scott run early in the fourth quarter, the only real highlights for the Eagles were sacks on Tom Brady and adventurous Jalen Reagor punt returns. The only drama was if more Buccaneers regulars could get hurt playing well past when they needed to in a blowout home win.

Most of social media took out its frustration with a largely uninteresting and uncompetitive game by blaming the Eagles, and more specifically Hurts. While he was clearly overmatched and made way too many bad decisions, slamming Hurts’ performance in his first career playoff game--against the defending champs and a healthy defense, no less--ignores the bigger picture. The play designs and plan of attack from head coach Nick Sirianni were no match for Bruce Arians’ well-schooled Bucs. The better-late-than-never rally made the score more respectable, but the game was never in doubt.

It was going to take significantly better play from a lot of Eagles, including but certainly not limited to Hurts, to make this one competitive. And that didn’t happen. Nor would the Bucs have permitted it. Tampa Bay proved why they earned rings last year and could very well again this postseason.

$.04--As everyone expected, the Ben Roethlisberger era for the Pittsburgh Steelers came to an inglorious ending in Kansas City. The Chiefs clobbered the Steelers with little trouble.

The score went from 7-0 Steelers, on a defensive TD from T.J. Watt on a scoop-and-score, to 35-7 Chiefs in a span of just 40 total combined plays. It surprised exactly nobody outside of the most optimistic yinzer that the Chiefs stepped on the gas and ran their wagon over what might be the worst team to make the postseason in some time--including the Washington team that qualified last year with a losing record.

Roethlisberger didn’t even try to throw the ball down the field. He attempted 46 passes, netting just 123 yards on 24 completions. Roethlisberger was not “bad”, just impotent. Whether by his own obvious physical limitations or the anemic, scared design of Pittsburgh coordinator Matt Canada, it was a lifeless effort of a team that knew it could not compete. From a Chiefs perspective, it was Alabama playing McNeese State a week before putting the big boy pants on to face LSU.

Yet Kansas City’s blistering win wasn’t even the AFC’s biggest blowout. In a game where I watched exactly two drives before giving up on the match, Buffalo bombarded New England 47-17. The Bills literally turned in a perfect game offensively. They scored touchdowns every single possession except for the final one in victory formation. No turnovers. No punts. No field goals. There was just one offensive penalty, a pass interference call against TE Dawson Knox, though the Bills scored a touchdown on the very next play.

The lack of any semblance of drama or even close to an equitable matchup in two of the AFC’s three games, plus the Buccaneers blasting the Eagles, evoked cries of undoing the recent playoff expansion. Aside from the fact the NFL will never put that genie back in the bottle, this weekend proved more that the gap between the true contenders and the teams who should have been happy just to make it is as big as it's been in some time. That could very well change next year.

The Bengals snapping the NFL’s longest postseason win drought deserves some mention. The last time Cincinnati won a playoff game, head coach Zac Taylor was seven years old. It had been since the 1990 season. It wasn’t easy for Joe Burrow & Co., but exorcising playoff demons seldom is. Good for the Bengals and the loyal fans who have witnessed a lot of really bad football and substandard ownership for much of those 31 years. And they might not be done yet, either…

$.05--With all the coaching changes after the season, a touchy subject for the NFL invariably comes up. After Houston and Miami canned David Culley and Brian Flores, respectively, there is just one Black head coach: Mike Tomlin. For a league where over half the players are Black, that’s a problem.

The NFL has tried to do better, or at least give the illusion that it’s trying to be better than that. The Fritz Pollard Alliance has created some opportunities and awareness, and the “Rooney Rule” at least guarantees that a Black person will interview for every head coach opening. They’re steps in the right direction, but they’ve proven unable to take the proverbial next step.

There is no easy answer or solution here. NFL teams are private businesses, and mandating the corporate behavior of private businesses isn’t exactly a popular concept these days. But the league can do one thing, even unofficially, to help one part of the equation.

Stop recycling bad white coaches.

I’m not talking about every white retread coach. But when an NFL team looks at the resumé of a guy like Adam Gase and thinks, “I must hire this person,” they need to be stopped. If a coach didn’t produce a winning record in the final two seasons of his tenure, or didn’t even make it to two full seasons, they should not be permitted to get another opportunity to prove they suck for at least three more years. That will stop the obvious mistakes like Gase, who ran Miami into the ground but still wound up being immediately hired by the Jets to somehow make them even worse.

Those are opportunities to look at better-qualified candidates of any background. Black coaches who are eminently qualified to run NFL teams should demand something like this. Actually, they shouldn’t have to demand it at all, but the owners obviously cannot be trusted to do the right thing and be saved from themselves here.

Say no to interviewing guys like Dan Quinn or Matt Nagy or Matt Patricia or Doug Marrone or any Ryan brother (even as a coordinator) or Jon Gruden. And yes, sadly enough, some out-of-touch owner will indeed need to be stopped from considering Gruden even after the ugly situation that led to him leaving Las Vegas as a pariah. Try giving someone new a shot, someone like Colts OC Marcus Brady or 49ers DC Demeco Ryans. They’re eminently more deserving of a first chance than any of those flops are of a second.

And it needs to be a legitimate chance, not in the way Arizona handled the one-and-done tenure of Steve Wilks. Was Wilks a good coach in Arizona? Absolutely not. Did the organization give him any chance to prove he could be a good coach? Hell no it didn’t. The same is true of Culley with the Texans in 2021. The love child of Vince Lombardi and Bill Belichick wasn’t winning with that Houston team and that ownership/management fiasco.

Culley almost certainly won’t get another chance to prove himself. Wilks won’t either. And that is the part of the process where the NFL can better police itself. If Black coaches who weren’t good never get a second chance, white ones shouldn’t either.