Dallas Cowboys win over NY Giants with bizarre Tony Romo comeback drive

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The Dallas Cowboys took on familiar division foe, the New York Giants, in the first Sunday Night Football game of the 2015 season and found themselves in danger of losing due to an all too familiar pattern. Bizarre turnovers. Strange plays. Absent minded mistakes. And this was after an evening in which the Cowboys, seemingly the better of the two teams on paper, appeared to be unaware that the regular season had started. But then in the final few minutes of the game something equally strange happened, this time in their favor.

With the Giants needing to bleed the clock down so that the Cowboys would have as little time as possible for a late comeback drive, newly-contract-minted quarterback Eli Manning made the nearly inexplicable decision to throw the ball away, thus stopping the clock. Nearly any other outcome, from a sack to a scramble to a simple kneel down, would have kept the clock running between plays. But instead New York effectively gave Dallas an extra forty seconds with which to work with on its final drive, and that turned out to be enough.

And so in a game which saw the Dallas Cowboys looking far less motivated than one would expect from a team hungry to get back to the playoffs, and more resembling their bumbling of 2013 than their dominance in 2014, in the end it was the New York Giants who found a way to bumble the game away. Tony Romo, fairly or unfairly so often tagged as the field captain of the very talented gang that couldn’t shoot straight, and so often accused of not being able to step up when it counted most, came through in the clutch and was the hero on the key drive of the big NFC East division game.

Cowboys fans counted their lucky stars and figured the law of averages owed them one. And that debt may still be on the table, as star wide receiver Dez Bryant was lost for a month or more due to an injury during the game. But if anything that may have made the comeback all the more improbable, and Romo all the more heroic: he and his team managed to pull this off while their best weapon was limping around in the locker room.

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