The Redskins are a bad football team.
Injuries have devastated their offense, which wasn't all that talented in the first place. Their quarterbacks are pedestrian, their defense is neither deep nor particularly talented and they've got nothing left to play for this season.
Given all of that, the fact that the Cowboys needed overtime and a field goal that might not have been good to win 27-24 on Sunday could be taken as a bad thing. It shouldn't be viewed that way, however.
This isn't the umpteenth reminder that a win is a win in the NFL and, therefore, nothing to apologize about. That's true, but the reason why playing a squeaker against a bad team is a good thing is because the last thing the Cowboys need right now is a reason to feel too good about themselves.
Jerry Jones hinted at that when he ripped the team's performance and, for once, the owner's bloviations were right on point. The Cowboys need to keep the intensity level as high as possible over the next few weeks to put themselves in the best possible position for the final quarter of the season. Having the Dolphins turn their season around helps on that front, but getting pushed to the limit by a bad team is an even better way to keep the team from getting overconfident or complacent.
We can't know if that would have happened if the Cowboys would have gone that route if they blew out the Redskins. But it seems a lot more likely that they would have started believing the talk about how easy they have it with this stretch of schedule. That makes it much easier to tune out talk about the things that went wrong and no team is good enough that they can afford to ignore the details that go into playing a complete game each and every week.
That's especially true coming into a short week when they need to cram so much work into such a short amount of time. A rout could have led to people taking their eyes off the ball, but the way the game went down means that it is impossible to believe any of your own hype.
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Winning games isn't easy, no matter who you are playing, and the Cowboys can't lose sight of that fact over the next two weeks.
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