Packers stun Cowboys 48-32 in wild-card upset behind Love's playoff debut

Aaron Jones grew up in El Paso, Texas, watching Emmitt Smith and the Dallas Cowboys. His father made them his team too. On Sunday in Arlington, Jones found himself running through the same stadium where Smith once played, carrying a football for the Green Bay Packers, tormenting the franchise he'd loved as a kid. He scored three rushing touchdowns. By halftime, the Packers had built a 27-0 lead. By the final whistle, they'd won 48-32, handing the Cowboys their first home loss since the 2022 season opener and ending a sixteen-game winning streak at AT&T Stadium that had felt, until that afternoon, almost permanent.

Jordan Love, the Packers' fourth-year quarterback making his playoff debut, threw three touchdown passes. Darnell Savage, who had gone the entire regular season without an interception, stepped in front of a Dak Prescott pass intended for CeeDee Lamb and returned it 64 yards for a score. Romeo Doubs, who had been hospitalized with a chest injury the week before, caught eleven passes for 151 yards. The Packers scored touchdowns on six of their first seven offensive possessions. They matched the point total of their Super Bowl-winning team from 2010, which had put up 48 points on the road against Atlanta in a divisional round game. This was a 10-8 team that had finished the regular season 6-2 and grabbed the NFC's final playoff spot on the strength of a 17-9 home victory over Chicago. Nobody had expected them to walk into Dallas and dismantle a 12-6 team that had won the NFC East.

The Cowboys' defense ranked fifth in the league. It didn't matter. Love completed 16 of 21 passes for 272 yards. Jones rushed for 118 yards, extending a remarkable streak: in all four career games against Dallas, he'd gone over 100 yards and scored nine touchdowns. The Packers had never lost in six trips to AT&T Stadium, including a Super Bowl victory over Pittsburgh during the 2010 season. They now had two playoff wins over the Cowboys. The first came in 2016, when Aaron Rodgers led a 34-31 divisional round victory against a Dallas team that had been the NFC's top seed and Prescott's rookie year. That Packers team had let a 21-3 lead slip away. This one, with Rodgers' successor under center, left nothing to chance. They built a 48-16 lead before Dallas scored twice in the final moments.

Prescott threw two interceptions early and finished 41 of 60 for 403 yards, with all three of his touchdown passes going to tight end Jake Ferguson. He looked stunned afterward. "From the beginning of the game, we got beat," he said. "There's no which way around it. There's no way to sugarcoat it. Shock." Love, by contrast, spoke with the confidence of a team that had believed in itself when the rest of the league had written them off. "We came in here with a mindset of we're going to dominate," he said. "A lot of people were counting us out, and we didn't care about that."

For the Cowboys, the loss raised immediate questions about the future of coach Mike McCarthy, who had been fired by Green Bay during the 2018 season and hired by Dallas in 2020. This was the second time in three postseasons that the Cowboys had lost their playoff opener at home. Dallas had won at least 12 games in three consecutive seasons without making a conference championship game—a distinction no other team could claim. They hadn't reached an NFC championship game since winning their most recent Super Bowl title 28 years ago. The 48 points they allowed marked the most in franchise postseason history. The previous high was 38.

Jones, standing in the stadium where he'd grown up dreaming of playing, reflected on the moment. "This was my dad's team," he said. "You always want to be like your father, so that's how it became my team. Dallas is a special place to me, so it's a full-circle moment. It feels like home." He had accumulated 488 yards in four career games against the Cowboys. The Packers, meanwhile, would travel to San Francisco next weekend to face the top-seeded 49ers in the divisional round. The Cowboys headed into an offseason suddenly uncertain, having squandered the chance to host at least two playoff games after surging to the division title in the final two weeks of the regular season.