49ers vs. Cowboys score: Live NFC wild card updates, results as San Francisco edges Dallas and Dak Prescott sounds off (2024)

The San Francisco 49ers finally have a playoff win in Dallas as they defeated the postseason rival Cowboys in a 23-17 win on wild-card weekend.

The 49ers move to the divisional round where they play at top-seeded Green Bay at 8:15 p.m. ET Saturday, Jan. 22 on FOX. Monday's Cardinals-Rams winner will travel to Tampa Bay for a game Sunday at 3 p.m. on NBC.

This live blog follows all the news and coverage from The Athletic's writers and staff from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Check out the complete wild-card weekend schedule. The Athletic also has live blogs for Raiders-Bengals, Patriots-Bills, Eagles-Buccaneers, Steelers-Chiefs and Cardinals-Rams during wild-card weekend.

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San Francisco 23, Dallas 17 | Box score

(Photo: Tom Pennington / Getty Images)

If football is art, then Sunday was an expressionist painting of Jimmy Garoppolo’s career. Beautiful and haunting. Inspiring and maddening. Resilient and fragile.

It was a masterpiece of a performance. Not for its perfection. Hardly for its brilliance. But for its spectacular accuracy in conveying the range of intense reactions he provokes. It was an authentic rendering of the emotional journey that is the Jimmy G experience.

Facing the Cowboys in the playoffs, Garoppolo found himself walking in the footsteps of 49ers legends. The matchup of vintage powers was the perfect canvas to refashion his image. Instead, he remained true to himself. Like most of his games in the gold helmet, it ended in a 49ers’ win, 23-17. But not before Garoppolo inspired both faith and dread. Not before he made winning feel inevitable and then made defeat feel imminent.

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Jerry Jones looked sick. As the Cowboys owner and general manager walked out of the locker room and toward a group of reporters Sunday afternoon, he appeared stunned.

Dallas’ season wasn’t supposed to end this way. There was too much talent, ideal health and an experienced coaching staff. There had been talk inside and outside The Star about Super Bowl aspirations. It was talked about as a special group with the ability to get the Cowboys back to the conference championship game for the first time since 1995. Instead, the Cowboys’ season ended in the wild-card round, 23-17, to the San Francisco 49ers in front of 93,470 inside AT&T Stadium.

“Very disappointed,” Jones said. “I’m disappointed for our fans. They deserved to win this game tonight, and they deserved for us to go farther. So it was quite a letdown.”

When was the last time Jones was this disappointed after a loss?

“I can’t remember,” he said.

This was a very weird way to win a playoff game. This was a very weird way to win just about any game, but I guess the 49ers have put everybody, and themselves, through this wringer enough times to make it seem almost normal.

And there’s a narrow, kooky, melodramatic and emotionally taxing path being drawn up here for the 49ers to get deep into the playoffs if they can possibly maintain this level of perseverance in the face of their own constant errors and weaknesses.

Point blank: They’re just gutsier than most teams they’re going to face, even in the playoffs. They’re brawlers. They’re used to getting slugged and staggered and even more used to getting back up and throwing a few more wild shots themselves. They don’t play pretty football, at least not for four quarters. They play frantically, they hang on tight, they wait for the other team to crumble and sometimes they crumble a little themselves.

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ARLINGTON, Texas — Think back to where the 49ers defense was 112 days ago.

One might say that they’d managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Sure, Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams — perhaps the league’s best quarterback-receiver combination — were on the other side, but there’s never a good excuse for a defense to blow a lead to an offense working with only 37 seconds and no timeouts.

And that’s exactly what the 49ers defense did on that Sunday night in late September.

It took Rodgers only two completions to rip off 42 yards and set up the winning field goal. The 49ers lost, 30-28. That defeat sent them into a slide and also set a prevailing early-season tone: This 49ers defense wasn’t very good and it certainly couldn’t hold a candle to the monstrous 2019 unit that led the way to a Super Bowl.

That last sentence is written in the past tense because it’s no longer true. The 49ers’ 23-17 wild-card win over the Cowboys on Sunday, just the sixth road playoff win in franchise history, was evidence of that.

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ARLINGTON, Texas — The final quarter was like a horror film in which the 49ers were visited by every ghoul that’s haunted them during the 2021 season.

There was a gut-punch special teams gaffe, the return — with gusto — of the bad version of Jimmy Garoppolo and injuries to critical players, Fred Warner and Nick Bosa.

Still, there was one other season-long theme that came into play against the Cowboys: little-known players stepping into major roles.

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The unnecessary substitution tactic following the successful fake punt in the fourth quarter wound up costing the Cowboys 29 seconds. That time would have come in handy if they chose to, I don't know, run a QB draw without any timeouts to end regulation.

As a general rule in the NFL, if you're trying to run a play then spike it, you need 16 seconds on the clock. The Cowboys had 14. Dak then left the ball on the turf rather than handing to the official, which led to an imperfect spot. Pre-play, can't assume a perfect operation w/minimal time.