The NFL playoffs are underway, and with their arrival fans of the Dallas Cowboys have a chance to be freed from watching any more of a 2024 team destined to miss this tournament for the first time in three years, seemingly from the start. Let’s face it, even for die hard fans like all of us here at Blogging The Boys, getting through all four quarters of 17 games for this year’s team felt more like a chore than something to look forward to for long stretches at a time. Now, each remaining NFL kickoff must be cherished, and the cream should continue rising to the top to save the best games for last as Wild Card weekend wrapped up on Monday night in Arizona.

While Cowboys fans may be enjoying the opportunity to watch top-end football and teams other than their own, the opportunity for realizing how far Dallas is from the teams that punched their ticket to the Divisional Round – and those that will go onto the championship games, a much more elusive plateau for the Cowboys – is also a sobering one. The two teams that finished ahead of the Cowboys in the NFC East were both winners on Wild Card weekend, but we’ll save our thoughts on that for the NFC version of “Views from the Couch”.

On the AFC side, MVP favorites Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen quarterbacked their teams to decisive victories at home. The Ravens built a 21-0 first half lead against a Steelers team that once again limped into the playoffs, and survived a bit of a second half rally to win 28-14. The Bills responded with the mentality of a championship team in front of their home fans, not allowing a single point to the Denver Broncos following an opening drive Bo Nix touchdown. The Bills won 31-7 in a game they quickly seized complete control of in impressive fashion.

The most compelling game out of the AFC was the one that kicked off the entire playoffs, with the Houston Texans holding their rightful place as hosts for a Saturday wild card matchup with the Chargers. With neither team known for much recent postseason success, it was second-year head coach DeMeco Ryans getting the best of first-year Chargers HC Jim Harbaugh. By rallying the Texans defense to intercept Justin Herbert four times and sack him four times as well, Houston bought plenty of time for C.J. Stroud and the offense to find their groove and turn a 6-0 deficit into a 23-6 lead. All three phases got involved in a wild game that saw the Texans pull away for their first playoff victory since 2019.

Both AFC Divisional games will now be rematches of regular-season meetings. The Texans will travel to the top-seeded Chiefs, the site of a 27-19 Chiefs win in Week 16. The Ravens will be at the Bills, looking to go 2-0 against Buffalo this year after beating them in Baltimore 35-10 in Week 4.

Before getting further into any of that, here are a few general observations on the AFC Wild Card games – watching on the couch along with the rest of America’s Team’s faithful.

Chargers at Texans: Having a QB that can create for himself is vastly important

Although a long time ago in current NFL terms, it really wasn’t all that long ago when Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik was touted as the next hot head coaching candidate. His work with C.J. Stroud as a rookie quickly made him a household name, but something of a sophomore slump in year two with Stroud – faced with devastating injuries to his supporting cast like losing WR Stefon Diggs for the season – has cooled down any talks of Slowik being handed the keys to a franchise just yet. The Texans first five possessions at home in the Wild Card game went lost fumble, three and out, punt, interception, and punt.

Both teams struggled mightily to create easy completions for their quarterbacks, a much more expected issue for the Chargers going into the playoffs relying more on defense and their run game. It took a gutty and resilient performance and come-from-behind effort, but the Texans flipped this “stat” and ultimately the scoreboard thanks to Stroud’s ability to improvise.

On the Texans’ first scoring drive, Stroud recovered a fumbled snap, extended the play out of the pocket, and turned a broken play that would have led to a punt and favorable field position for the Chargers into a 34 yard gain.

Houston still needed to do something they hadn’t up to this point in the first half to put points on the board, and that was continue to string together plays to finish the drive. They did just that when Nico Collins scored from 13 yards out to give the home team an improbable 7-6 lead before halftime.

Stroud’s speed on the edge was a great neutralizing factor against the Chargers bookend pass rushing tandem of Khalil Mack and Joey Bosa. His ability to extend plays and make something out of nothing was a harsh reminder of how rigid the Cowboys offense has looked at crucial junctures through both seasons of former head coach Mike McCarthy calling plays. Dallas has all but shut down the idea of Dak Prescott being a running quarterback ever again, now coming off another season ending injury going into 2025.

How much they’ve overstepped and handicapped Prescott’s ability to challenge defenses with his full skillset is harder to judge though. If the Cowboys are serious about continuing to ask Prescott to win on an every-down basis from the pocket, they will need to find a way to improve significantly at both the skill positions and up front this offseason. With plenty of young players at both spots and two draft picks that started the majority of games at left tackle and center going into year two, it’s unlikely the Cowboys plan to seriously improve at either WR or OL involves bringing in much outside talent.

Plays are going to break down in this league, and what happens in those moments can go a very long way in deciding outcomes. The Cowboys had a play caller in McCarthy that believed he would have another call ready for every situation, practically living to see third down as many times as possible in 2024. This is simply not a recipe for sustained success on the side of the ball where Dallas also has the most long-term cap commitments, and the up-and-coming Texans were hardly the only team to prove this on Wild Card weekend.

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Steelers at Ravens: Another reminder of what the Cowboys missed out on with Derrick Henry, and the importance of not overrating team culture

In the third meeting between the Steelers and Ravens this season, both teams about played their expected parts at the conclusion of Saturday’s action. A Ravens team out to prove their viability as a conference contender did so by rushing for 16 first downs and holding the ball for nearly twice as long as the Steelers. The key to this game for Baltimore was always going to be maximizing the QB advantage between their MVP candidate Lamar Jackson and Russell Wilson making the start for the Steelers. Doing so by leaning on a QBs best friend, a strong run game, certainly didn’t hurt as Derrick Henry gained 186 yards on 26 carries with two touchdowns.

This offensive performance by the Ravens doomed Wilson and the Steelers to their fifth straight one-and-done trip to the postseason, dating back to 2017 under Mike Tomlin. Wilson was destined to be the latest QB that hardly stood a chance in a playoff moment for Pittsburgh, failing to cross midfield for the entire first half while the Ravens built a 21-0 lead.

As if beating a division rival to advance in the playoffs wasn’t sweet enough for Baltimore, they also squashed the biggest narrative about last year’s playoff team that lost at home to the Chiefs. Not leaning into the run game enough in that matchup against the eventual Super Bowl champions, the Ravens 299 yards on the ground was their most in any game since 2020. Derrick Henry continues to prove that his gas tank is never empty, and with each spectacular performance makes the Cowboys look sillier in the process.

The idea that Dallas missed out on a serious upgrade in the backfield when not pursuing Henry in free agency has been visited enough times, probably to the point of Cowboys fans feeling numb while watching him dominate the Steelers. The Ravens were expected to be in this position and have earned such lofty standards for themselves, while the Cowboys, regardless of if they employed Henry, have not.

The bigger takeaway from this game actually came from the losing side. The Steelers came in to this playoff game with a four-game losing streak to end the regular season. In his 18th year, Mike Tomlin continues to be anointed as one of the best locker room and team culture builders in professional football, and his team continues to show how overrated this quality really is. Sure, the Steelers have both been to the AFC Championship and won a Super Bowl more recently than the Cowboys. Where Dallas has at least had teams capable and even favorited to reach some of these same milestones though, Pittsburgh has not been taken seriously as a threat in the playoffs for some time. Their culture has become nothing more than one that’s apparently complicit with just being a Wild Card team year after year, not seeing the need to risk changes that could put them over the top to at minimum reach their first Divisional Round game since 2017.

Both the Cowboys and Steelers, two of the league’s most iconic brands, need to have long looks in the mirror at who they are solely between the lines as football teams. In every season, there comes a time where this is the only thing that matters after all, and when it does both teams have folded numerous times in recent history. The Steelers had to learn this in yet another meaningless trip to the postseason, while the Cowboys dragging their fans through 18 weeks of irrelevance and manufactured drama is arguably worse. McCarthy even mentioned having won a championship “in this building” as a reason to not doubt his pedigree following the Cowboys season-ending loss to the Commanders from AT&T Stadium, ironically referring to a Super Bowl in which his Green Bay Packers beat Mike Tomlin and the Steelers.

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Broncos at Bills: So this is what a Super Bowl team looks like

To be honest, this may have been the hardest game to relate back to the Cowboys as the kickoff to Sunday’s action in Buffalo. A fascinating matchup between rookie quarterback Bo Nix and the upstart Broncos against Josh Allen and the favorited Bills was just the start of what made this a good game to sit back and take in without too much of a thought of the doom and gloom that surrounded the Cowboys this year. In the end, the Bills emerged as a team on an entirely different plane as the Broncos, scoring 31 unanswered points and cruising to the Divisional Round for the fifth straight season.

It isn’t every year that a Super Bowl contending team makes a statement like this in the Wild Card round. Some have the benefit of the elusive bye that only each conference’s top seed earns, but many others find themselves in a closer game having to truly earn it. The amount of situations the Bills look ridiculously comfortable in, paired with the sheer amount of ways they can beat an opponent without even including Josh Allen’s MVP level play at QB, was breathtaking.

The Cowboys may not have played the Bills this season, but other games against playoff opponents like the Lions and Ravens painted a pretty clear picture of the disparity between them and these contenders. With the Lions on a bye in the NFC bracket and Ravens almost expected to handle the Steelers in the manner they did, the performance of the weekend so far goes to the Bills. They firmly sent a message to the rest of the NFL that beating them from here on out will be a monumental task.

Putting the Cowboys aside to enjoy this run by the Bills, or any other teams that emerge to challenge them, is important in the big picture of getting back to enjoying the lasts of this season before the inevitable doldrums of the offseason. The big picture for the Cowboys hasn’t changed since plenty of kickoffs still awaited them in 2024 though, and that is how horribly far off the pace they are. Compared to a Bills team that treated their home crowd to a masterclass against the Broncos, it’s fair to question if the Cowboys and Bills even competed in the same sport this calendar year.

Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images

The Bills have embraced putting the players they have available on a weekly basis in the best position to win with terrific synchronicity between their coaching staff all the way up to the front office. They are now 9-0 at home this season with an MVP favorite at quarterback. The absolute most humbling part of this for Cowboys fans is likely that their own QB in Prescott was firmly in the MVP conversation just a year ago, and Dallas was equally dominant at home, but both of those things unraveled in the worst possible way in 2024 following a one-and-done playoff loss. The Cowboys have gotten to the point of not knowing how to reclaim either of these things in the same amount of time it took the Bills to get back to the point of playing like early Super Bowl favorites this postseason. It is all humbling.