The jokes flew via social media during the first half, with an easy punch line about how only a Jason Garrett-led team could screw up the pregame coin flip. In the moment, though, when the entire civilized world thought the Cowboys had voluntarily given the first possession of both halves of the game to the visiting Rams, it indeed seemed like Dallas had, in fact, managed to somehow shoot themselves in the foot before the gun was even loaded. Luckily, it turned out to be something of a non-issue, thanks to a 21-point Cowboys halftime lead that made who got the ball to start the third quarter a relatively trivial detail.
After Dallas rolled to a 44-21 victory, the bizarre coin flip fiasco was back to being a source of comic relief for a team that hasn’t had much to be lighthearted about in nearly a month.
“Definitely a weird start,” quarterback Prescott said in his postgame press conference. “We wanted to set adversity there instead of on the field, so we could play from behind immediately.”
Prescott was joking, of course, about the team’s frequent and maddening habit of putting themselves behind the 8-ball, as they’ve done in each of their seven losses on the season. Rocky starts and mental gaffes have plagued the Cowboys all year, but announcing the team’s intentions during the coin toss shouldn’t be this hard.
One would think.
“Depends on the strategy, right?” Prescott explained afterward to the media. “You can say ‘Defer,’ and that means you want the ball in the second half. You can ‘Kick it,’ and kick it both halves. Or you say ‘Receive’ and ‘We want it.’ So there’s a lot of options.”
When asked what he did, in fact, say, Prescott brought the house down with his deadpan reply: “A little bit of everything. There’s audio to it.”
“Just bad use of words by me,” Prescott confessed.
But defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence, standing right next to Prescott during the pregame ceremony, threw himself under the bus for causing the controversy.
“Well, it was my fault, actually,” Lawrence told reporters after the game. “I wanted defense to go out first. I felt like we had a lot of energy, wanting to get it off our chest. We had something to prove- especially after that playoff loss [to the Rams in last year’s playoffs]… We [were] going to receive the ball, but I told him to kick it. Defer it. But once you say, ‘Kick,’ I think that means you’re kicking off and you’ve got to kick off the second half. I don’t know, but we were supposed to say ‘Defer.” That was the confusion, but it’s all good.”
It’s “all good” only because the league stepped in and intervened at halftime. Officials in New York contacted game referee Walt Anderson’s crew in Arlington with word that Prescott had, in fact, used the word defer, even though it had come well after he originally- and quite clearly- said kick. Rather than abide by what Prescott actually said, the league granted Prescott what he had obviously meant.
Of the rule, “It says that we can get involved, replay can, as far as game-administration issues: downs, enforcements, things like that,” NFL senior vice president of officiating Al Riveron said, via ESPN. “So, by rule, we can get involved. This is a game-administration issue, not a judgment call, for example. And we have definite audio that refers to deferring.”
The league was arguably under no obligation, though, to alter the referee’s on-the-field decision. The attention given to the matter during the FOX Sports telecast may have given the mix-up some much-needed clarity. Even head coach Jason Garrett was unsure of what had happened until he was brought up to speed by a member of the broadcast crew.
“Dak had told me that he used the word ‘defer’ out there,” Garrett told the media, “so we felt like we had a case there; they needed to kind of hear it. And then I was actually coming into the locker room, and Erin Andrews made me aware that there was some audio that they were going to refer back to.”
By the time Garrett called in to Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan for his weekly interview, he was ready to brush off the whole mess.
“It all worked out,” Garrett said.
Yes, but the scenario could have easily taken a different turn: had the league chosen to stick to Walt Anderson’s call, had TV cameras not picked up the audio of the actual exchange, or had it been just a one-score game or less to start the second half. Even as a strange sidenote to the contest that followed, the scene might now turn a spotlight on a part of each and every game that fans, coaches, and even players apparently take for granted.
Why does the start of every NFL game hinge on the use of a single confusing magic word? Why is there even an option for a team to kick off to start both halves?
But beyond the mechanics that go into the standard pregame coin flip, Cowboys fans would be justifiably screaming a much different tune Monday morning if “Defergate,” as some were calling it, had genuinely played a role in the game’s outcome. Why is DeMarcus Lawrence apparently deciding possession based on his own gut feeling? Isn’t starting on offense or defense and facing one direction or the other all part of a predetermined team strategy? Shouldn’t all the team captains at the coin flip go to midfield already knowing exactly what they’re calling if given the chance? How does the starting quarterback not know the proper procedure, as archaic as the involved word choice might be? Doesn’t all of the above uncertainty ultimately fall on the coaches? All of the obvious kidding aside, how can Garrett’s team not have this figured out?
It may just be silly decorum and magic words that didn’t even decide a game. But if the Cowboys aren’t disciplined enough to handle the intracacies of a coin flip cleanly, what does that really say about the men in the locker room? About the men who lead them?
“Able to listen to the audio, we got it figured out, but just wasn’t the best,” Prescott said. “Wasn’t the cleanest coin flip I’ve been a part of.”
Prescott said it with a smile, but imagine if the Rams had gotten the ball to start both halves. Imagine if they had scored both times. Imagine if that had been the difference in the final outcome. In a season where questionable officiating has hurt the Cowboys, this time it was the officials who inexplicably saved Dallas from embarrassment.
“They did a good job, you know,” Lawrence said of the referees. “They’re supposed to do their job. I mean, they understand.”
But fans don’t understand. They may laugh now about the silly close call of the coin toss, but the snafu really speaks to much deeper problems with this team’s leadership. And what needs to happen in order to fix that may no longer be a 50/50 proposition.
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