For the second straight season, the Dallas Cowboys—the team that popularized the Hail Mary pass almost 50 years ago—didn’t even consider throwing it into the end zone against the San Francisco 49ers.
The slips of coach Mike McCarthy and the blunders of tight end Dalton Schultz prevented the Cowboys from setting up for something like Roger Staubach’s last-minute 50-yard game-winner that stunned the Minnesota Vikings in a 1975 playoff game.
Instead, we saw a trick play with Ezekiel Elliott running back alone in center with no linemen by his side and Prescott with a shotgun with 76 yards left and 6 seconds left on Sunday.
Elliot was knocked out as soon as he came out of the low snap, and 49ers cornerback Jimmy Ward blew a pass from Duck Prescott to wide receiver Cavontae Turpin.
“Very strange,” 49ers linebacker Fred Warner mused. “I don’t know if they planned to be in that situation, obviously because it didn’t work out very well. We are preparing for everything. When you have players like Jimmy Ward just showing up and (blow up the game) it makes things easier. We are preparing for everything.”
Not like Cowboys.
A year ago, Dallas flopped a final drive in a 23–17 home loss to the Photoniners when Prescott ran a 14-yard quarterback tie in 14 seconds and no timeouts and then passed the ball to his center instead of the umpire, the only one who can spot the ball.
It was taking too long, and Prescott didn’t have a chance to hit the ball into the end zone before the Cowboys’ season was up.
On Sunday, the Cowboys suffered setbacks, the final game being just the culmination of a comedy of gaffes and miscalculations by Dallas, who failed to make it past the divisional round for the 26th straight season.
“I don’t really want to go into details, but that was clearly not my plan,” McCarthy later said, declining to discuss what was to happen in the last play.
Before that, the Cowboys screwed up a lot of other things.
McCarthy decided to send the ball to fourth and tenth after Prescott sacked the Dallas 18 with just under 3 minutes left. It’s a controversial decision, but it was the nearly 40 seconds it took the Cowboys to hit the ball that infuriated their excited fans.
Cameras showed McCarthy taking the hitters out of bounds at the 2:35 mark, and the 49ers returned the ball with 2:05 left in the game. That’s 40 seconds from the last Cowboys draw to the change of ownership, which is almost twice as long as usual.
There are a couple more plays the Cowboys could have played after recovering the ball in 6th position in just 45 seconds with no timeouts left. (By the way, if Turpin had taken a chance and let the ball bounce, he could have gone into the end zone for a touchback, instead giving Dallas the ball at his 20.)
The cowboys haven’t stopped wasting precious time either.
After finishing third and 1st in the Dallas 15, Prescott hit Schultz with a 9-yard pass with 28 seconds left. But Schultz didn’t go ahead as he went out of bounds on a shot from cornerback Charvarius Ward, so the clock kept ticking and went down to 14 seconds before Prescott snapped the next snap and threw an unfinished one.
“You have to go ahead if you’re contacted going over the top,” said Fox Sports color analyst Greg Olsen. “You must fight this contact! Chavarius Ward, he knows the rule; they train it. You must show up, make physical contact, and force this official to stop the clock.”
Then, on the second and 10th of his 24s with 10 seconds left, Prescott found Schultz again, this time 15 yards from Dallas 39, almost the extreme limit for Prescott to try “Hail Mary” on last click.
Delay.
The catch was changed on the replay because Schultz never put his other foot down when he casually stepped out of bounds.
This resulted in a third and 10th out of 24 with 6 seconds left and Dallas had Elliott replace Tyler Biadache in center with the defensemen and tackles lining up in a wide line. (The formation was legal because matching receptionists TY Hilton and Noah Brown lined up outside of the guards and holds and all seven were in the line of scrimmage.)
“It looks like Zeke is going to go to the center,” Olsen said excitedly. “It’s like my football team. Apparently Mike McCarthy was working on his final script and let’s see what he came up with!”
San Francisco called a timeout after seeing the strange sight.
When play resumed, Dallas did not change lineup or decision. Elliot grabbed the ball and got busted. Prescott telegraphed his throw to Turpin, who immediately choked to death.
And the Cowboys went into another off-season mourning their playoff loss to the Photoniners because they couldn’t get out of the Hail Mary to give them a fighting chance.
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AP Pro Football writer Josh Dubow contributed to this report.
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