Reasons why Dallas lost:
3. Zuerlein. /QUOTE]
I would place it into a possibly losing.
If you take all the other plays. The dropped passes, the dropped interception, the missed blocks, the penalties and added them up to being football. Situations where another player is actively succeeding in preventing you from making a play or doing your job.
If all those other plays stay the same, good and bad for both teams, then the simple FG miss by Zuerlein, on a distance well within his capability is a serious event that made the outcome of the game different.
If he nails the FG earlier, then Dallas' TD at 4:48 would have tied the game.
When the Cardinals take over the ball at the 4:42 mark MM would not be desperate to stop the clock until it became evident that the Cardinals were going to kick the winning FG.
Edmonds fumble at the 2:58 mark would have been a play that we could have contested with a timeout.
That would have given us the ball with more than two minutes and two timeouts. A chance to win the game.
You have to get the easy points when they present themselves. The game is a struggle, and you never know what the path of the struggle will be.
In this case we lost the ability to utilize timeouts for challenges due to being down by three points as opposed to being tied.