ARLINGTON, Texas — Jason Witten scored a touchdown and handed the football to Marc Colombo so the burly offensive lineman could spike it. Then they leaped and bumped chests, with Colombo losing his balance on the landing and tumbling across the end zone.
Pretty silly, eh? The Tennessee Titans will be laughing about it for a long time.
A penalty for excessive celebration pushed back the kickoff, and Tennessee’s Marc Mariani followed with a long return, setting up a 1-yard touchdown by Chris Johnson with 3:28 left in the fourth quarter. That gave the Titans a 34-27 victory Sunday over the Dallas Cowboys in a game they were struggling to put away.
“That misconduct penalty was big,” Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said. “That return probably doesn’t happen if they’re not kicking off down there (on their 15).”
The Titans (3-2) did plenty of things right, like Johnson running for 131 yards, Vince Young throwing two touchdown passes and the defense coming up with six sacks and three interceptions.
But this game will be remembered for all the things Dallas did wrong : 12 penalties (two by Mike Jenkins for pass interference leading to a Tennessee touchdown on the opening drive; a hands-to-the-face that erased a punt-forcing sack on another TD drive) and all those sacks against Romo, who had gone down only once in 128 attempts coming in.
There were three sacks on one drive in the second quarter, forcing right guard Leonard Davis to the bench — until his backup got a finger in the eye. The costliest sack was a 6-yarder on a third down that pushed a field-goal attempt back to 44 yards; David Buehler narrowly missed when a make would have put Dallas ahead.
Instead, the Cowboys (1-3) are off to their worst start since being 0-4 in 2001
“It was an exasperating game,” coach Wade Phillips said. “It looked like we had turned a corner, then it went the other way on us.”
