Defense claws out a result with 3rd down sacks

The defense can certainly be proud of making some key plays at key moments on Sunday. As we constantly discuss in this space, at the end of the season, the NFL standings do not ask "how?", but rather they ask "how many?" in terms of the number of wins a team accumulated rather than the way they went about doing so. Sunday was a very courageous result for the Cowboys to put in the win column, but if you believe that there are always clues and characteristics of winning football, I would ask you to not examine the Bengals win very closely. This game will puzzle historians for years on the issues of how the Cowboys pulled a win out of there. Almost any and all metrics point to the theme that the Bengals will kick themselves for months if this game costs them the playoffs because they simply should not have lost it by any stretch of the imagination. The pregame chatter revolved around the idea that the strengths of the Bengals appeared to be the weaknesses of the Cowboys. And, on fi...