The Cowboys Invented a New Way to Lose

Many didn’t think it was possible but the Dallas Cowboys once again found a path toward additional embarrassment.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

There is a strange contradiction at the center of coaching football. It is simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult places to find a competitive advantage because, in theory, the assignment is relatively straightforward: Hire somebody who will make better decisions than the person standing on the opposite sideline. Of course, finding that person is considerably more difficult when every NFL team has millions of dollars and enormous staffs with enough analytical information to determine what color socks produce the highest third-down conversion rate during a waxing crescent moon. Still, the basic expectation remains the same. At some point, somebody has to decide what to do.

Brian Schottenheimer failed the Cowboys in that regard Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, and I don’t know how else to describe it. Dallas lost 34-31 to Baltimore on a 56-yard Tyler Loop field goal as time expired, which makes the ending sound considerably more conventional than it actually was. This wasn’t merely a case of Lamar Jackson doing something absurd. Dallas spent the final seconds assembling a collection of decisions that, taken individually, were questionable. Taken together, they felt like somebody attempting to lose a football game in a particularly elaborate manner.

Start with the possession that should have ended it. A controversial pass interference call gave Dallas the ball at the Baltimore 2-yard line with 23 seconds remaining, and the Cowboys responded with a goal-line fade — a play call that will eventually be responsible for my death. A false start followed before Dak Prescott scrambled for two yards, at which point Dallas immediately called timeout. The timeout is where things become particularly irritating because there was no obvious reason to preserve every remaining second for Baltimore, especially when Dallas’ entire objective should have been scoring while leaving the Ravens as little time as humanly possible. Then came the decision that might bother me most: Schottenheimer instructed Prescott to throw the ball away if he didn’t like what he saw, even though George Pickens eventually came open for what could have been the winning touchdown.

Fine. Brandon Aubrey kicks the tying field goal, and Dallas still has overtime sitting there waiting if it can simply make seven seconds disappear. Instead, Aubrey was instructed to kick a touchback, giving Baltimore the ball at its own 35 with enough time to run one play; Schottenheimer later explained that Aubrey had already kicked two balls out of bounds, which contributed to the decision. I understand the logic in the most technical sense possible, but we are talking about Brandon Aubrey, one of the best kickers on Earth. Apparently Dallas decided it could trust him to make basically any field goal imaginable but could not trust him to kick a football in bounds and force somebody to run around with it for a few seconds.

Baltimore naturally completed a 27-yard pass to Zay Flowers, and Dallas compounded the problem by tackling him immediately. That is admittedly a strange criticism because tackling the person with the football is one of the foundational concepts upon which the sport has been constructed, but with seven seconds remaining and Baltimore possessing a timeout, Flowers running around for another couple of seconds would have been considerably more useful than immediately putting him on the ground. Instead, the Ravens had enough time to run one more play. Loop came onto the field and the Cowboys watched a game they had effectively secured disappear through the uprights.

There are probably more things to complain about, but eventually an autopsy becomes excessive. The more interesting concern is what a loss like this does to a team because Dallas didn’t walk away from Brazil looking like a group that had simply been beaten by a better opponent. The Cowboys looked like a team that knew it had given something away, and those are often the losses that linger because there isn’t an obvious football explanation you can fix Tuesday morning. The season isn’t over at 1-2, obviously, but the Cowboys now have to spend the next week convincing themselves that the people making decisions in the biggest moments won’t make the same mistakes again.