Campo Feels the Heat in Dallas

Even on the busiest shopping day of the year, Dallas Cowboy fans simply weren’t buying what Coach Dave Campo was selling.

The Cowboys scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns in a 26-24 loss to Denver on Thursday, and a string of questionable decisions by Campo probably cost them the chance to win, or at least force overtime. On Friday, the phones at KTCK-AM rang nonstop.

“It’s chaos here,” said Danny Balis, a producer for the station’s sports talk show. “Only about one out of 20 callers agree with Campo. Most people think he made the wrong decision about the two-point conversion, and somebody has to be accountable. The die-hard Cowboy fans are furious.”

Here’s how the Campo calamity unfolded:

With 7:29 to play and Dallas trailing, 26-10, Reggie Swinton returned a punt 65 yards for a touchdown, bringing Texas Stadium to life. The Cowboys had narrowed the deficit to 26-16, and could have trimmed it to eight points with a successful two-point conversion.

It looked as if they were going for two. Ryan Leaf ran onto the field holding up two fingers, and Campo paced the sideline doing the same. But, while trainers worked on an injured Pepe Zellner in the end zone, the Cowboy coach lost his nerve. He decided it would be too tough to make the conversion, get the ball back, then score another touchdown and two-pointer to tie.

“To make two two-pointers back to back, the percentages were not with us,” Campo explained later. “I felt our best chance was to try to go for the win.”

That would require two scoring drives--a touchdown and a field goal--in the final seven minutes. It also meant the Cowboys would need to successfully execute an on-side kick and get a clutch field goal from inexperienced Jon Hilbert, playing in his second game for them.

(Entering the week, NFL teams were successful on 46% of two-point conversions and 30% of on-side kicks.)

So Campo opted to have Hilbert kick the extra point, and his team trailed by nine. Three minutes later, the Cowboys got the ball back and made a first down. Another curious decision followed: They punted on fourth-and-10 with 3:07 to play. Apparently, things weren’t desperate enough for Campo’s liking.

Then, the heartbreaker. Leaf guided the Cowboys to a third touchdown with 1:10 to play--a score that would have given them a chance to tie had they made the earlier two-point conversion.

All hopes of a phenomenal finish ended when Denver recovered the ensuing on-side kick and ran out the clock.

Afterward, Cowboy players steadfastly refused to question the decisions of their coach. But Denver safety Eric Brown told it like it was: “That’s really stupid. Why did he do that? They were trying to give us the game.”

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Also in Dallas, Emmitt Smith is quietly fading out of the picture. The second-leading rusher in NFL history was standing on the sideline for most of the fourth quarter.

Once the league’s best short-yardage threat, Smith was reduced to spectator, watching rookie Troy Hambrick twice bash into the end zone from the one.

“No one asked me to go into the game, but I didn’t press the issue,” said Smith, who has yet to score this season and, with 486 yards rushing, is in danger of ending his streak of 10 consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. He needs 1,075 yards to pass Walter Payton in the record books.

It’s unclear if that will happen in Dallas. Monday, on Randy Galloway’s radio show, Campo said Smith “doesn’t have to complete that contract; he can go ahead and give us back some salary-cap room.”

As the Cowboys try to claw their way out of the NFL cellar, a conflict is emerging. Should they try their best to win now, or write off the season and use the remainder of their games to evaluate talent--such as Hambrick--for the future?

“I didn’t sign up for evaluation,” Smith told reporters. “I signed up to try to come in here and win. The evaluation period is in training camp. Once you lock and load for the season, you’ve got to commit. This is not a time for trial and error. I mean, you’re playing with guys’ careers and livelihoods out here.”

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Things might have gone much differently for Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem had the Detroit Lions decided to hang onto him in the 1970s. Stufflebeem, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff who holds daily media briefings at the Pentagon, was a punter who spent part of 1977 training camp with Detroit before being released.

He was no paper Lion, averaging close to 35 yards on 16 punts that exhibition season. Ultimately, though, he gave up football for flight school, and since has flown fighter jets or commanded a squadron in combat missions over places such as Iraq, Israel and Bosnia. When they needed a punter in 1979, the Lions checked back with him.

“At that point I was in flight training,” Stufflebeem told the Detroit News. “I knew what I really wanted to do, and that was to fly airplanes. If I’d have gotten out of the Navy, I might have tried to give it a go, see how well I could do.”

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Rich Gannon never really blossomed as a passer until he got to Oakland, but one of the things that stood out about him during his years in Minnesota and Kansas City was he seldom made mistakes. He has maintained that reputation. When he threw an interception against San Diego Sunday, it was his first since the opening series of the season, ending a string of 277 passes without an interception. Bernie Kosar holds the NFL record at 308.

Buffalo’s Joe Ferguson set the record for best pass-to-interception ratio among starting quarterbacks in 1976, throwing one interception in 151 passes.

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Atlanta cornerback Ray Buchanan on Carolina losing to San Francisco: “They were supposed to win that game last week, but San Francisco again pulled a Houdini. I’m believing there’s some witchcraft over there. We’re going to find out. Somebody’s walking around with that Harry Potter wand.”