Super Bowl LI is officially set as we found out on Sunday that the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots will be the two teams that square off for football's ultimate prize.
Both won their respective Conference Championships in convincing fashion. The Falcons won by a margin of 23 and the Patriots put 19 points between them and their opponent. While theoretically the game's top four teams would be playing this weekend and produce big-time matchups, that hasn't necessarily been the case this season.
NFL Postseason games so far.
Sucked
Sucked
Sucked
Sucked
Sucked
Sucked
Amazing
Sucked
Sucked
Sucked
(Super Bowl 51 🙏)
The NFL has put out a lower-than-usual quality product this season, and that norm was bucked whenever the Dallas Cowboys were playing. Week in and week out America's Team saved NFL ratings and produced epic finishes… including one last week that left us all devastated.
Yes, the Cowboys lost to the Green Bay Packers and that's a reality that we've all been living with for a week now. If any of those Green Bay faithful want to know how to deal with a loss, they can call us for advice just go ahead and figure it out on their own.
The NFC Championship Game did leave a lot of members of Cowboys Nation thinking, though… would this have been the quality of game had the Cowboys managed to pull off a victory last week? Surely that isn't the case, right? There's no way we'd be that bad?
Dallas Would Have At Least Made It A Game
At one point in time, the Packers were trailing 31-0 in the NFC Championship Game. That's a real sentence. In the game BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL the Packers were getting absolutely obliterated.
While they were at least in the game the Cowboys fell into a similar hole against those very Packers when they trailed 21-3 at one point during the Divisional Round. In an effort unbeknownst to Green Bay, Dallas managed to tie their game not just once, but twice… losing ultimately by a margin of three.
Given that the Packers struggled mightily on the ground against Atlanta and that's an area of the game where the Cowboys are known to have some success, one could certainly imagine that Dallas would have been far more in this game than the Green Bay Packers.
Would The Cowboys Have Been Able To Beat The Falcons?
Atlanta put up 493 total yards and 44 points in the NFC Championship. Dallas only allowed that much yardage or more just once in 2016, on Thanksgiving against the Redskins when they surrendered 505 total yards. The most points that the Cowboys allowed across the season were the 34 that the Packers scored when they lost.
There was only one other time that the Cowboys allowed at least 30 points, an even 30-point performance when they traveled to Pittsburgh… arguably their greatest game of the season.
When you consider the extreme potency that the Atlanta Falcons Offense carries and look at how when the Cowboys faced a fraction of it, and lost, against the Green Bay Packers… you start to really wonder about things.
While it is certainly fair to assume that Dallas would have shortened the game by running Ezekiel Elliott, this was a strategy that they didn't even employ effectively against Green Bay. All signs of logic point to the notion that the Atlanta Falcons Offense simply would have been too much for the Cowboys had they indeed met in the NFC Championship.
Enjoy your win this year, Atlanta. Next season we're coming in far more prepared. Huzzah.
