Jets stay in wild-card race, but hardly look the part against Cowboys
ARLINGTON, Texas — The New York Jets found enough resolve in the fourth quarter to rally against a team that turned to its fourth quarterback of the season, one making his regular-season pro debut.
They intercepted four passes in all and needed a touchdown and a game-winning field goal on their final two drives to edge the lowly Dallas Cowboys 19-16 at AT&T Stadium.
"Truth be told, we shouldn’t have been in that situation," Jets defensive end Sheldon Richardson said. "It was a big stadium, but it wasn’t a big team. We should have beat them (by) a lot more than we did."
Make no mistake, the Jets (9-5) are alive in the AFC playoff picture. But they aren’t necessarily well.
In the easiest of their three remaining games, they hardly looked like a playoff team for most of Saturday night’s contest. The reality: Even after winning their fourth consecutive game, they do not control their own destiny.
Even if the Jets win their final two games — home for New England (11-2) and at Buffalo (6-7) — they will be on the outside looking in if the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers also win out because of the three-way tiebreaker scenario. And the Chiefs and Steelers, two of the league’s hottest teams, may not stumble at all the rest of the regular season.
If the Jets repeat their uneven performance from Saturday night, they are highly unlikely to win out.
"We had tough sledding for awhile," said quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who completed 26-of-39 passes for 299 yards. "There is going to be adversity throughout the game. I thought that was a great sign for us, to show that the belief is always there. This is a winning football team. And we felt we were going to win even when we were losing in the second half there."
The Jets needed Fitzpatrick at his best — and he was — late in the fourth quarter just to beat a Cowboys team that dropped to 4-10. New York displayed a myriad of issues that will need to be corrected against more formidable competition, namely the Patriots next week.
The Jets missed an extra point and saw a penalty negate a made field goal in the second quarter.
The Jets and their league-leading rush defense had allowed a total of 110 rushing yards in their previous three games. But the Cowboys rushed for 55 yards on their first drive alone.
New York struggled at times in key short-yardage situations. On fourth-and-1 from the 3 in the first quarter, running back Chris Ivory plowed up the middle but was stopped short of the first down by DeMarcus Lawrence, who has been the Cowboys’ best defensive player over the past month.
The Cowboys’ quarterback situation became so dire that they turned to former Boise State standout Kellen Moore less than five minutes into the second quarter after a horrid start by Matt Cassel, who threw an egregious interception and was also sacked for a 19-yard loss. In playing Moore, who made his NFL regular-season debut Saturday, the Cowboys played four quarterbacks for the first time since 2001.
In the third quarter, Moore and Fitzpatrick traded interceptions on back-to-back drives. The Cowboys stretched their lead to 13-9 with a 38-yard field goal.
Fitzpatrick engineered two late-game scoring drives to keep his team at the forefront of the wild-card race. But the climb to the playoffs remains steep.
"It is tough, the ebbs and flows of the season," linebacker Calvin Pace said. "You are up, you are down. Things are going great, things are going bad. One thing I can say, we have stayed the course."
Follow Eric Prisbell on Twitter @EricPrisbell.
GALLERY: BEST OF WEEK 15 AROUND THE NFL