The journeyman was nearly the hero of the day in the Cowboys’ 24-19 loss to undefeated Pittsburgh, but showed plenty of grit along the way.
For the second Sunday in row, a relative unknown was seemingly plucked from obscurity and found himself the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. And while the Cinderella story didn’t work out last week for Ben DiNucci against the Eagles, Garrett Gilbert came within one play of scripting a most improbable Hollywood ending against the rival Steelers this past weekend.
The sixth-round draft pick from 2014 made his first NFL start after brief tenures with the Rams, Patriots, Lions, Raiders, Panthers, and Browns… with a league-leading stint in the AAF thrown in for good measure. To be sure, the 29-year-old has played a ton of quarterback in a lot of places. But Sunday’s game that came down to the final do-or-die play was the stuff of backyard childhood fantasies.
“That’s what you live for as a quarterback,” Gilbert told reporters after the 24-19 loss in Arlington. “That’s what you live for as a football player. Unfortunately there, those last two drives, I just couldn’t make enough plays for us to finish that one off. But that’s the type of thing that you dream about, and that’s the type of situation that you live for as a quarterback.”
The Austin native was signed by Dallas on October 12 after the season-ending injury to Dak Prescott. After a subsequent injury and COVID-19 diagnosis to Andy Dalton and Week 8’s lackluster performance by third-string rookie DiNucci, Gilbert got the call against highly-touted Pittsburgh.
He made the most of it, ending the day 21-of-38 for 243 yards and a first-half touchdown to CeeDee Lamb. He added 28 yards on three carries on the afternoon, and impressed star running back Ezekiel Elliott along the way.
“He knows our playbook- seems like- in and out. He knows it very well,” Elliott said in a postgame conference call. “On top of that, though, he has some dog in him. He went out there and made some big plays, and he gave us a shot.”
In fact, he almost delivered a walk-off knockout blow against the league’s last unbeaten team. Taking possession at the team’s own 19-yard-line with no timeouts remaining and under 40 seconds to play, Gilbert scrambled to avoid pressure and fired a sideline dart to Lamb for a quick 32-yard pickup, making a miracle finish suddenly seem within reach.
“Garrett is definitely a warrior,” Lamb explained afterward. “That’s how I look at it; he kind of was thrown into the fire. This is how he responded.”
But the journeyman passer wasn’t done. Another 20-yarder to Michael Gallup put the Cowboys on the Pittsburgh 29. A short pass to Cedrick Wilson gained an extra six yards.
With four seconds remaining, Gilbert took what would be the game’s final snap.
“We’re pushing everyone vertical, and then had CeeDee coming across the front line of the end zone,” Gilbert said of the last-chance play. “There was a chance for it. I moved up in the pocket a little bit, and I just missed him a little too far inside. I think he had a shot at maybe making a catch there; I’ve just got to give him a better ball.”
Nevertheless, Elliott spoke of the team’s confidence in Gilbert, even in the huddle before the potential game-winning play.
“We work on situations a lot,” Elliott shared. “So I was confident that we were going to get in there and score. We’ve worked that situation plenty of times this season. Didn’t get it this time.”
Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy echoed those sentiments, saying he liked what he saw in crunch time from his fourth starting quarterback of the season.
“Garrett’s poise in that drill was exactly what you’re looking for,” McCarthy told the media after the game. “We talk about the characteristics of the two-minute [drill], and one of them is: you’ve got to be comfortable winning the game on the last play. And that’s what it came down to there. We just wanted to make sure we were in position to win it on the last play of the game, and we obviously didn’t convert. More times than not, you see people try to do too much, but I thought he did a great job managing the clock with his decision-making.”
With the team on a bye, it’s unclear what happens now to the quarterback position in Dallas. Much will depend on how Dalton proceeds through the COVID protocol and how soon he can rejoin the team’s practice sessions. The Cowboys travel to Minnesota on November 22, with the Thanksgiving rematch with Washington to follow four days afterward.
Sunday’s Week 9 game just missed being the biggest upset of the 2020 NFL season. Instead, it goes in the books- rather unremarkably- as the Cowboys’ seventh loss in nine games. But this one felt quite different to a team and a fanbase that had become numbly accustomed to embarrassing performances and humiliating defeats.
In many ways, that made Sunday’s improbable nail-biter easier to swallow.
But for the unlikely would-be hero of the day, coming so close to a win made the loss even tougher to bear.
“Losing sucks, you know?” Gilbert offered. “I felt like our guys played really hard today and played really well, and we deserved a chance to win that game. And obviously, we gave ourselves that chance, but it’s just really tough when all of us together put everything into that thing and then come up short.”
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