Packers dominate Cowboys to advance to divisional round; what’s Mike McCarthy’s future in Dallas?

By Matt Schneidman, Jon Machota and Saad Yousuf

The Green Bay Packers started fast and dominated the Dallas Cowboys in a 48-32 road win in the wild-card round of the NFC playoffs Sunday. The Packers will face the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round next week.

Green Bay led Dallas 27-7 at halftime and didn’t let up, scoring 21 points in the second half thanks largely to running back Aaron Jones, who rushed for 115 yards and three touchdowns, and quarterback Jordan Love, who had a near perfect 157.2 passer rating.

The Packers opened the game with a 12-play, 67-yard drive that ended with the first of Jones’ three touchdown runs. His second came after a Jaire Alexander interception set up a drive at the Dallas 19-yard line.

Love stretched the lead to 20-0 with a 20-yard touchdown pass to receiver Dontayvion Wicks to cap a 10-play, 93-yard drive. Love also threw touchdown passes to receiver Romeo Dobbs and tight end Luke Musgrave in the second half.

Packers go up 32.

Jordan Love throws his third TD on the day.

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— The Athletic NFL (@TheAthleticNFL) January 15, 2024

Dallas was unable to get its offense going until just before the halftime break when quarterback Dak Prescott found tight end Jake Ferguson for a 1-yard touchdown pass. Prescott finished 41-of-60 passing for 403 yards with three touchdowns and two interceptions. His second interception was returned by Darnell Savage 64 yards for a score.

Ferguson caught all three of Prescott’s touchdown passes, with two scoring grabs in the fourth quarter that helped the Cowboys pull within two scores with 3:25 to play.

Cowboys receiver CeeDee Lamb, who finished No. 2 among NFL wideouts with 1,749 yards this season, had nine catches for 110 yards but most came with the game out of reach.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said after the game he hasn’t thought about when he’ll sit down with coach Mike McCarthy. He declined to comment specifically about any coaching decisions.

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Embarrassing performance by Cowboys

At this stage in his career, Prescott just can’t play that poorly. There’s no excuse. Not with basically a completely healthy offense and playing in a building where the Cowboys had won their previous 16 games. Prescott was an MVP candidate during the regular season. He made second-team All-Pro. But much like last year’s playoff loss at San Francisco, he turned in one of the worst games of his career on Sunday. And Lamb didn’t do nearly enough to help.

McCarthy is the coach, but he’s also the offensive play caller. Jerry Jones praised McCarthy last week after the team’s season finale win at Washington when asked about McCarthy’s job security. But he added at the end of his statement, “We’ll see how each game goes.”

There’s no way Jones expected Sunday’s game to go like that. McCarthy has one year remaining on his contract. Does Jones move in another direction? The natural replacement that so many have speculated about is the team’s defensive coordinator, Dan Quinn. After Sunday’s wild-card loss, there’s no obvious answer. Jones has some critical decisions to make in the upcoming days because this team isn’t as close as he thought it was to making a Super Bowl run. — Jon Machota, Cowboys beat writer

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Dallas’ defense deserves major blame for loss

This was an absolute embarrassment for the Cowboys’ defense, and more so for Quinn, who has been a hot name for head coaching vacancies around the league. The Cowboys’ offense no-showed but it was the defense that set the tone for ineptitude with a bad penalty on the first drive of the game. Perhaps the lasting image of this game will be Packers tight end Musgrave catching a touchdown late in the third quarter to make the score 41-16. The game was already over before that but there was not a Cowboys defender in the same universe as Musgrave on that play, which was the most fitting representation of how the evening went for that side of the ball.

Aaron Jones had another field day against the Cowboys, rushing for over 100 yards and those three touchdowns. Jones has always been a Cowboys killer. What was jarring is how the Cowboys made first-year starting quarterback Love look like a future Hall of Famer, like the guy he took over for in Green Bay. Love was almost flawless, boasting a 157.2 passer rating with less than five minutes left in regulation.

The 48 points allowed by the Cowboys is the most in franchise history, surpassing the previous high of 38 points. The Packers scored their 48th point with over 10 minutes left in the game. — Saad Yousuf, Cowboys beat writer

Jones, Love come up big for Packers

I sat down with Jones for about 20 minutes on Thursday and we talked about a variety of things. During the interview, I used the term “house money” to describe what the seventh-seed Packers were playing with entering their wild-card round matchup with the second-seed Cowboys. Jones put both his hands on the table we were sitting at, pushed the tablecloth toward me and said two words.

“All in.”

The mentality of the oldest player on Green Bay’s offense manifested itself in what can only be described as an utterly shocking performance at AT&T Stadium on Sunday.

There were four teams without a Pro Bowler, the teams with the top three picks in the upcoming draft and the Packers. The Cowboys had seven, yet the Packers won by 16 points. Jones ran for three touchdowns, giving him seven scores on the ground over his last two games in the building. The Packers didn’t have a 100-yard rusher for the first 14 games of the season, but Jones eclipsed 110 yards on the ground in each of the last four games, including running 19 times for 115 yards against the Cowboys.

Love, in his playoff debut, completed 16 of 21 passes for 272 yards and those three touchdowns, good for a perfect 157.2 passer rating. Dobbs, who entered Sunday with a career high of 95 receiving yards, caught six passes for 151 yards and a touchdown.

Don’t forget, there was a stretch of seven consecutive games this season during which the Packers didn’t score more than 20 points. — Matt Schneidman, Packers beat writer

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Give Joe Barry credit

Defensive coordinator Joe Barry’s back was against the wall after three straight putrid performances against the New York Giants, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers in Weeks 14-16. Now? The embattled play caller might just be earning back his job for next season.

The Cowboys ranked No. 1 in scoring offense this season (29.9 points per game) and scored only seven first-half points. They scored 32 total but only had 16 before garbage time. Both Alexander and Savage intercepted Prescott in the opening 30 minutes after Prescott posted only one multi-interception game all season. The Packers turned both into seven points, Alexander’s via the offense and Savage’s via his own pick-six. If the Packers play this kind of complementary football against the top-seed 49ers next weekend, who’s to say they can’t pull off another upset? — Schneidman

Required reading

(Photo: Cooper Neill / Getty Images)