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 Brian 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.

Hold on, there’s more.

Why, when time was such a preciously finite resource, would he hand the ball back to one of the greatest short-yardage offenses in NFL history, a group of people seemingly created in a laboratory to move the ball in painfully efficient increments, who had just started to break through his defense with regularity.

The Cowboys had all three of their timeouts and the two-minute warning, so despite the decision to punt (which the analytics models hated anyway), they did get the ball back, though with a mere 45 seconds.

So then why, when there was time for one last play, did he opt for absurdist theater? Ezekiel Elliott firing a wobbly snap back to Prescott and getting completely demolished for no good reason. Prescott firing a 10-yard comeback that immediately resulted in a game-ending tackle. During the buildup of this moment we were expecting something with the grandeur of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, and we ended up with a wet cardboard boating accident between toddlers.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the general calculus that, if you love your defense, you will put your faith in them. Dallas had performed admirably against San Francisco for three and a half quarters. Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn is going to walk into a head coaching job here in a few weeks, and deservedly so. But that truism only really holds up when you are punching one handed, when your quarterback is below the Sam Darnold line of capability and your chances of scoring are worse than hitting on one of those scam parlays promoted by the NFL every Sunday.

This team has Prescott, CeeDee Lamb and Elliott. This team finished the year as one of the 10 most efficient passing units in the NFL under OC Kellen Moore. Prescott, according to the kind of analytics McCarthy had promised to follow, was the sixth-best passer in the NFL this year in situations where the defense was expecting a throw (a 70% likelihood or better of a pass).

It feels like a low blow to now start talking about Sean Payton, the former coach lurking over seemingly every open position, and a potential scenario in which McCarthy is removed from his post, even though that’s probably what Team Payton is hoping we’ll do. The wound that was the 2022–23 Cowboys season hasn’t even fully defined itself in terms of size and scope, and there are already people jamming a pencil inside it. And for the record, I don’t think there’s a marked improvement there. McCarthy can be a great coach when he’s able to get out of his own way (Jerry Jones told reporters after the game that he considers McCarthy “safe,” which feels about as valuable a currency right now as Discovery Zone prize tickets).

But the reality of this situation is one of puzzling indecision, just like it was last year when the Cowboys ended their season against this same team unable to get a spike off. McCarthy deserved our adulation for the way he handled Prescott’s absence and kept this team afloat with Cooper Rush in 2022. Nothing about his Cowboys tenure has been simple or low-profile. I especially credit him for having the humanity to stick with kicker Brett Maher, instead of hitting the eject button on a person dealing with the yips, leaving him to stew in his own brain for an offseason.

McCarthy has also overseen the kinds of in-game situations that contribute to an excellent core of players missing out on the biggest game of the year. Year after year. We were planning on a Cowboys Super Bowl at some point during the Prescott era, but it seems further away now than it did before McCarthy arrived in the first place.