IRVING, Texas — Brian Westbrook had a tough choice: score the easy touchdown to give the Philadelphia Eagles a big, late lead over the Dallas Cowboys, or stop just short and secure a four-point win.
He gladly took the victory.
Westbrook’s maneuver with a little more than two minutes left seemed bizarre, but was brilliant strategy. With Dallas out of timeouts, all Donovan McNabb had to do was take a knee three straight times to give the Eagles a 10-6 victory Sunday.
Westbrook gained 24 yards, then stopped inside the 1. He wasn’t rubbing it in, just running out the clock.
“It was brilliant,” Philadelphia coach Andy Reid said. “He used that Villanova education and transferred it to the football field.”
The bottom line is that Philadelphia (6-8) ended a three-game losing streak, kept alive hopes of snagging a wild-card playoff berth and avenged a nationally televised blowout loss to Dallas six weeks ago. The Eagles also ended the Cowboys’ seven-game winning streak and prevented them from tying the franchise record for wins in a season.
As bad as it sounds for Dallas (12-2), the Cowboys knew before kickoff they had secured a first-round bye — and that they couldn’t lock up home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. So the stakes were pretty low. And they played like it.
Dallas had its fewest yards of the season (240) and didn’t score a touchdown for the first time since November 2004.
It was the Cowboys’ second straight lousy outing and they came away with a bunch of injuries, starting with the thumb area on Tony Romo’s throwing hand. X-rays showed no break, but the thumb is at least bruised. Romo had it wrapped and iced during his postgame news conference and insisted, “I’ll be fine.”
“If we go on and win the Super Bowl, the loss is a good thing,” Romo said. “If we lose the first round of the playoffs, the loss is not a good thing.”
