Seventy-six points in eight quarters will make you take notice. That’s what the Dallas Cowboys’ offense, without the benefit of a return touchdown, dropped on the Giants in two games this season.

They’re not alone in the suffering. The Cowboys have laid waste to most of the NFL this season in tacking up 455 points (second-most in the league) and 365.7 yards per game (third most).

But it’s a group that is under question heading into Sunday’s divisional contest against the Giants in Dallas, based on some contrary, late-season trends. To know the Cowboys is to start with three guys: quarterback Tony Romo, offensive coordinator Jason Garrett, and assistant head coach/offensive line coach Tony Sparano. Terrell Owens, Marion Barber, Jason Witten, that mammoth offensive line … we’ll get to them in a bit.

Romo’s work this season has been nothing short of tremendous. Sure, his 19 interceptions are a sore thumb, but the club records for touchdown passes, passing yards, and completions — this is the Dallas Cowboys we are talking about — speak pretty loudly that Romo’s major inconsistencies are a story for last summer. Or …

“I’m not so sure about that,” one NFC scout said Tuesday. “Watch the last three games [of the regular season]. He was off. All year, even in the Buffalo game, he hit his guys in stride. He hit them right in the hands and made the right reads. I have seen a lot more mistakes the last three, and only half that time was without [Owens] on the field.”

Owens’s high-ankle sprain, which he suffered against the Panthers in Week 16, has been the major talking point of the week and clearly is a broken cog in this offense. In the six full quarters after Owens’s injury, the Cowboys totaled a measly 261 yards, though as many have pointed out, they had little to gain with the NFC’s top seed locked up the final week of the year.

“I think people forget, we played pretty good offensively against Carolina. We had 400 and some [405] yards of offense,” Romo said yesterday. “So we didn’t carry all of our stuff against Washington just because — and that is part of what you do — sometimes you just put [a preseason-type gameplan] up there and you go out and do it. “But we are very confident. And I would say the only game this year that we really struggled offensively would be the Philadelphia game. And I think part of that was just me being off.”

Meanwhile, new league rules allowed Garrett, the Pro Football Writers of America Assistant Coach of the Year, and Sparano to interview for two and three head-coaching vacancies, respectively, the week of the divisional playoff games. Garrett, the former backup to Troy Aikman in Dallas, spent three years as a QB coach with the Miami Dolphins and is in his first season as a coordinator, but his stock has catapulted to the point where it’s almost certain he’ll be a head coach within a year, if not in the next month. The offensive players have fed off his approach.

“[He has brought] aggressiveness,” Cowboys wideout Patrick Crayton said. “He’s never been scared to pass the ball. If teams put nine [defenders] in the box at the end of a game, he’s not just going to grind it out. If they stack it up, he will still attack.”

And Sparano, perhaps the apple of Bill Parcells’s eye for the Dolphins’ head-coaching opening, is the man many feel is the silent architect in the Cowboys’ offensive scheme. The Cowboys’ line protection has been far improved this season, and Sparano’s roots as the team’s running-game coordinator have served him and his team well. But now the team has to be concerned that this week, both men’s attentions are elsewhere with interviews, cross-country flights, and cell phones ringing like mad. Garrett, for one, turned down every press request put in for him this week.

“The reason they are really good coaches is because they do what they are supposed to do and do it well,” Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips said yesterday, downplaying the issue. “There is no talk about anything except this ball game.”

The game and the preparation could look similar because of the familiarity of the Giants and Cowboys, meeting for the third time this season but the first time ever in the postseason.

“When it comes to the playoffs ,you can’t draw up too many new plays,” CBS analyst Phil Simms said. “You are who you are. You can’t turn into a zone team from a blitzing team. You become so familiar with what the other team does, that should help you.

“It could drive scoring down. I don’t expect the Giants and Cowboys going up and down the field in this game because of too many good players and too much information available about what the other team is trying to do. That should curtail some of the scoring,” Simms added.

And that familiarity should pertain to Owens. Giants head coach Tom Coughlin said, “He will play. There is no doubt in my mind he will play.”

And if that’s the case, that means the Giants’ defense has the chore of stopping those damaging deep crossing patterns that Owens runs — “bad, bitter memories” in Coughlin’s mind, he said — all while containing first-down machine Witten, who caught 96 passes, respecting a run game with Barber and Julius Jones that ranked 10th in the NFL in yards per carry, and get some heat on Romo, which the Giants failed to do consistently the first two times.

“We didn’t get enough pressure,” Coughlin said yesterday of the Week 11 meeting. “There is no doubt about that because Romo is such an athlete and has the ability to feel where the pressure is coming from and make quick, really quick, decisions about getting rid of the ball. You need to have the pressure.”

Otherwise, the Cowboys might get back quickly to their 9.5-points-per-quarter pace.

Mr. Edholm, a senior editor at Pro Football Weekly, can be reached at eedholm@pfwmedia.com