The Dallas Cowboys lost in absolutely brutal fashion on Sunday in Brazil.
You know what happened. We will never be able to forget it. In case you want to re-live it though, the Cowboys tied things up with seven seconds left and seemed of the mind that their opponents were as willing as they were to go to overtime and figure things out there.
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Perhaps the Ravens were good with that, but if they were they likely changed their mind after the kickoff put them at the 35-yard line. To be clear it wasn’t the kickoff return that did this. It was the kickoff that Brandon Aubrey sent through the endzone, and him doing so took none of the seven seconds that remained in the game off of the clock.
In the aftermath of the loss many Cowboys fans wondered how and why that sequence unfolded. Brian Schottenheimer provided the answer in his postgame presser by saying that Aubrey was told to boot it through the endzone given his trouble keeping things in bounds earlier in the game.
Aubrey actually let multiple kicks get out of bounds before that point in the game. It makes sense that Cowboys brass wouldn’t trust him given that context.
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But was the lack of a trust something that should have outweighed the risk that this decision carried? The risk that ultimately burned the team? And shouldn’t the highest-paid kicker in the NFL not be one that can’t be trusted in critical situations like this?
There is no other way to look at this whole situation as anything other than a failure within the game. Brandon Aubrey failed by creating doubt within his coaching staff, and the staff themselves failed by miscalculating and misplaying the situation. Everyone involved has to be better.
