Dallas Cowboys

Aikman went too easy on Cowboys, Eagles with harsh assessment

Published Sep. 21, 2015 10:50 a.m. ET

foxsports

By Dan Levy

The Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys played one of the worst football games in NFL history on Sunday. The Eagles had 21 yards at halftime, having failed to convert any of their third down attempts. The Cowboys had a paltry 6-0 lead at the break despite dominating the entire first half thanks to double-digit penalties and their own third-down ineptitude. And yet, the 6-0 lead felt somewhat insurmountable after watching the Eagles' inexplicably incompetent offense run 16 offensive plays in the first 30 minutes.

At one point in the early second half, I turned to my family watching the game with me and simply said, “this is the worst football game I can remember watching.”

Moments later, almost on cue, Troy Aikman echoed those sentiments, albeit to a tad larger audience watching Fox Sports’ NFL Game of the Week. (Video via Uproxx.)

“This is not good football. This is a terrible game to watch,” Aikman told Joe Buck, and roughly 20 million people thinking the exact same thing at home, longing to be watching the Raiders and Ravens or Dolphins and Jaguars instead.

It was beyond terrible really. We would have rather watched Jacksonville or Oakland! That’s how bad it was!

Barry Horn of the Dallas News pulled some more of his favorite Aikman comments from Sunday. They would be hilariou, if the rest of us didn’t have to suffer through the game with him.

Maybe my favorite came in the final two minutes: “I’m embarrassed and everybody should be embarrassed,” the Hall of Fame former Cowboys quarterback said. “This has been about as poor a performance as I’ve ever seen in this league.”

Or maybe it was: “I think the Emmys thought this would be a good lead-in for their show,” Aikman said. “It didn’t work out that way … [We will] walk away from this game with a different opinion of these two teams, especially the Eagles.”

Chip Kelly told his team they need to “figure it out,” because the offense “let a really good defensive effort go for naught” because the offense was so terrible.

Credit should be given to Dallas’ defense as well, because the Eagles weren’t just forcing balls to covered receivers, running into tacklers and dropping easy first downs all game. Dallas’ defense made some great plays as well. They made the game as ugly as it was.

Without Dez Bryant, Romo or any semblance of a running game in Dallas, the Cowboys are going to have to continue to win ugly if they have any chance to return to the playoffs this season.

Yet Sunday’s win at Philly wasn’t just ugly. It was something terribly worse.

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