We were planning on pinning this on the kicker, the poor man with the quiet eyes who spent the entire day being followed around by a network camera like he was hosting an art installation on internal tumult.
We were planning on pinning this on the quarterback, too. And while Dak Prescott’s final throws of the Cowboys’ season leading up to the two-minute warning in Sunday’s 19–12 divisional round loss to the 49ers were not pretty, were not economical and were almost game-endingly disastrous, they were not the reason Dallas still hasn’t made it back to the conference title game since the Clinton administration.
And so it was that we landed on the coach. After the Cowboys took over at their own 18-yard line with 2:59 left, they failed to gain a yard and faced fourth-and-10. Mike McCarthy sent out the punt unit, letting nearly all of the play clock tick down before Bryan Anger could boot it away. We were all mouths agape, wondering why on Earth he decided to remove the ball from his quarterback’s hands and punt the football instead of giving him a shot to move the chains on fourth down. Why, if a punt was a possibility, was the punt team not ready to swoop onto the field like an overzealous SWAT unit. Why the internal calculus of a man who was once one of the league’s most aggressive fourth-down coaches and billed his coaching rebirth in Dallas as one steeped in analytics (in 2020, the Cowboys were second in the NFL in fourth-down conversion attempts and were dead last in ’22 with 19) has winnowed to a point where Dallas’s alternate logo could be a forlorn man waving a white handkerchief.
