With the Cowboys taking heat for the way they handled the end of their loss to the Ravens, head coach Jason Garrett is accepting the blame.
“It starts with me,” Garrett said.
The Cowboys trailed by two points with 26 seconds left and had the ball at the Baltimore 34-yard line. With a timeout remaining, Dallas should have been able to run a few offensive plays and move into position for a relatively short field goal. Instead, the Cowboys ran just one play, gaining one yard, before Dan Bailey’s 51-yard attempt missed.
So why did the Cowboys call a play that had Dez Bryant catching a one-yard pass and getting tackled inbounds?
“That’s my responsibility,” Garrett said. “I made that play call and I got to do a better job of that. . . . We left too much meat on the bone there. We need to get more than one yard when we had the one timeout and 26 seconds.”
Part of the problem was that Cowboys receivers Miles Austin and Kevin Ogletree ran deep routes on that one-yard gain and didn’t hustle back to the line of scrimmage, wasting valuable time before the Cowboys could run another play. In the end, the Cowboys didn’t run another play and just called timeout with six seconds left and sent the field goal team out. Garrett said he blames himself for Austin and Ogletree not knowing they needed to hurry back to the line.
“The urgency to get back is critical in that situation,” Garrett said. “We have to do a better job in that situation, and it starts with me.”
Clock management issues have plagued Garrett, who sometimes seems like he’s so focused on calling the next offensive play that he can’t step back and see the bigger picture of the game. Here are Mike Florio, Rodney Harrison and Erik Kuselias discussing the Cowboys’ clock management woes on Pro Football Talk on NBC Sports Network: