SEATTLE – Three weeks ago, Julius Jones was pretty much a football nobody, languishing as an injured rookie running back on a bad Dallas Cowboys team.
But on Monday he had his second straight monster game on national television, ripping the Seattle Seahawks for 198 yards and three touchdowns as the Cowboys stunned the Seahawks 43-39 at Qwest Field.
His 17-yard touchdown run with 32 seconds left capped a rally in which Dallas scored 14 points in the last two minutes.
“I’m out of words for what I’m feeling right now,” Jones said after the game.
Last week, Jones ran for 150 yards and two touchdowns in a 21-7 victory over Chicago on Thanksgiving Day.
Two weeks before that he was still on the sidelines because of a fractured shoulder blade. Through the first nine games of the season he had just five rushing attempts for 16 yards.
In his first three NFL starts during the past three weeks, he has 93 carries for 429 yards and five scores.
That ought to endear him to Dallas coach Bill Parcells, who would love to see the second-round draft choice out of Notre Dame become his workhorse.
“Once again, I proved that I can handle the load,” Jones said of what his performance on Monday means to his career. “I go out every game with a chip on my shoulder, just to prove something.”
He certainly impressed Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren.
“He’s a good back,” Holmgren said. “I will have to look at the film and see what happened, but you have to give him his due. He had a lot of yards. I know that.”
Jones scored on runs of 8 and 10 yards right before and after halftime to give Dallas a 26-14 lead.
After the Seahawks scrambled back to take a 39-29 lead with 2:46 left, conventional wisdom suggested that the Cowboys would try to come back through the air and Jones’ night was essentially over.
And, in fact, Vinny Testaverde’s 34-yard touchdown pass to Keyshawn Johnson breathed life into the Cowboys’ hopes with 1:45 left.
Still, when the Cowboys recovered the ensuing onside kick, it didn’t figure to be a running back who would make the difference. Maybe a handful of passes and a field goal attempt to get to overtime, or something like that.
But Jones, the 43rd player taken in the draft this year, had other ideas.
He said he was not going to settle for a field goal and overtime if his coaches would just call his number, and he made good on that commitment.
He had runs of 9, 2, 16 and 17 yards as the Cowboys stormed 57 yards in eight plays. The final run for the decisive touchdown looked like so many other solid runs through the night as he took a delayed handoff from Testaverde and slithered up the middle of the Seattle defense, shedding arm tackles along the way.
“I didn’t want a field goal,” he said. “A field goal was not good enough. We wanted it. We wanted this game real bad.”
And so Jones returns to Dallas a hero, and hardly anonymous, there or anywhere else in the football universe.
“This is big, not only for me, but for our team,” Jones said. “I have confidence in myself, but this is really unexpected.
“I always expect to go out and have a good game, but tonight was just incredible,” he said. “I’ll never forget this game.”
He’s not the only one.
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