IN MY OPINION

DALLAS COWBOYS DEALT ANOTHER REALITY CHECK IN PLAYOFF EXIT

So this is how it ends for the Dallas Cowboys. The rising defense gets run out of town. Ezekiel Elliott gets stuffed – even on a crucial fourth-and-one. The weirdest calls go the wrong way. Hope is put on the shelf until next season.

Rams 30, Cowboys 22.

The Cowboys, with some of the NFL’s best young talent and two division titles in three years, may believe they can envision a championship run from here. But until proven otherwise, what a mirage.

The Cowboys can grow and need to learn from their experiences.

Here’s a real-time reality check: The divisional round of the playoffs is Dallas’ glass ceiling.

For the third time in five years, the Cowboys have been good enough to find themselves in the second round of the NFC playoffs, one win away from the NFC title game. And once again, this is the end of the line. Two years ago as a No. 1 seed, they were eliminated by a last-minute dagger from Aaron Rodgers. Before that, it was the Dez Bryant catch that wasn’t. Now it’s L.A.’s two-headed rushing monster – Todd Gurley and C.J. Anderson – as the symbol of doom.

With Gurley and Anderson both cracking triple-digits, L.A. rushed for 273 yards – most in playoff history for the Rams, most in playoff history against the Cowboys – to flip the script for what might have been.

Wasn’t it the Rams’ D that was supposed to have the problems stopping the run?

L.A. allowed an NFL-worst 5.1 yards per carry during the season but held the NFL’s rushing champ to 47 yards on 20 carries. Meanwhile, the Rams’ high-flying offense, with the fancy passing game creations of young wizard Sean McVay, suddenly found a new identity especially for this moment.

You might think that the 32-year-old McVay, the league’s youngest coach, is the NFL’s version of Harry Potter, given his magic touch for scheming open receivers. Well, on Saturday night, McVay turned into Ground Chuck, and the Cowboys had no answers to slow down a Rams running game that was reminiscent of the run-first system that Chuck Knox employed for the Rams in the ‘70s.

The Rams ran on a season-high 48 attempts while Jared Goff threw just 28 passes. Of course, there was the McVay touch to all of the ground work, as the Rams repeatedly used the so-called “jet-action” – typically fake end-arounds or “ghost sweeps” that threw Dallas’ defense for a loop.

The reality of all this is, the Cowboys are a team that gets a shift and motions and they get into your eyes. The Cowboys had to be locked in and queued into your key. That’s something the Rams got  the best of the Cowboys Saturday Night.

And add it to the list of lessons the Cowboys need to learn from. Dallas had the NFL’s fifth-best run defense during the season, but the unit looked like a shell of that on Saturday.

You heard that by listening to Kris Richard, the highly regarded assistant who calls the defensive plays for the Cowboys. He sounded disgusted when someone asked him if the run fits were out of sync.

In any football game if a team is running the ball you have to be able to correct things as the game moves on.  The Cowboys needed to dig their cleats into the grass and they couldn’t get the job done.

Maybe the Cowboys will learn from this. Perhaps they can make schematic adjustments. Maybe the intensity will go up a notch. Like every team, there will be personnel tweaks here or there.

Maybe so. But the Cowboys were in this spot two years ago and grew only so much from that. They learned enough to get right back to the divisional round … only to fall flat again.

Perhaps that’s why Garrett cringed when the notion of taking steps to the championship level was mentioned as he walked up the ramp leading to the buses. After the Cowboys clinched a playoff berth in December, Garrett told his players that it wasn’t a matter of settling for progress – the mission is to win it all now.

Well, the Cowboys failed again in that regard. They are going home again, with this generation of Cowboys doing no better than their predecessors. Dallas hasn’t won a Super Bowl since XXX, following the 1995 season – which also happens to be the last time the Cowboys won in the divisional round, too.

And there’s no guarantee that they’ll get back to the this stage any time soon.

Sure, they have core players like Elliott, Smith, Dak Prescott, Amari Cooper and Demarcus Lawrence (who is set to cash in as a free agent) in tow. But this is the NFL, where fortunes can change in a hurry.

That lesson – and the urgency to seize the opportunity when it is there to be grasped – needs to be the biggest takeaway for the Cowboys in the wake of another sad ending.