Sunday night’s NFL contest was billed (sorry Buffalo) as the biggest game of the weekend and one of, if not the, biggest games of the NFL season when the unbeaten San Francisco 49ers played the 3-1 Dallas Cowboys in a game many believed would be a preview of the National Football Conference championship game.
The NFL and NBC spared no expense and fielded their dream teams of camera people and announcers and filled television land with opinions on the game’s profound implications for the postseason. The teams also featured a couple of quarterbacks, Sam Darnold for San Francisco and Trey Lance for Dallas, who had been top-three draft picks out of college, a pair of blue chippers if ever there were some. But Sunday night both were watching their teams going up against each other. Watching being the operative word.
And that was the irony of the game and the basis of this week’s lesson: both Darnold and Lance were sitting on the bench as backups. The starters in this pivotal contest were Brock Purdy for the 49ers, a player who was drafted dead last in his draft year and thus earned the designation of “Mr. Irrelevant,” a perverse “honor” that goes to each year’s last draft pick. We wrote a while back on Purdy’s honorary award here.
Lining up under the Cowboy’s center was fourth-round pick Dak Prescott who has endured an up and down year thus far but has his coach’s and, more important, Cowboy’s legendary owner Jerry Jones’ support.
