Cowboys HC Mike McCarthy makes painful admission about what happened on wild fake punt no one understood vs Texans
Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy probably knew he'd be asked about it before he even took the podium postgame after his team suffered its seventh loss of the 2024 NFL season. In a game where plenty went wrong as the Cowboys fell 34-10 to the Houston Texans, Dallas ran a fake punt early in the […]
Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy probably knew he'd be asked about it before he even took the podium postgame after his team suffered its seventh loss of the 2024 NFL season.
In a game where plenty went wrong as the Cowboys fell 34-10 to the Houston Texans, Dallas ran a fake punt early in the game which featured Bryan Anger as the passer for the second time since Week 9, when he was also asked to throw the football against the Atlanta Falcons.
Unsurprisingly, the fake didn't work out. Why would it? They just tried something very similar two weeks ago! And it turns out, it was a clear showing of being outcoached, per head coach Mike McCarthy himself, who got brutally honest as he admitted it was a chess match the staff lost. The Texans baited them.
"It was not of high priority, it was really a check that reacted to what they were doing," McCarthy told reporters postgame. "And then they dropped a guy into coverage from the backside, they won the chess match there, that was a poor call by us."
Watching the replay, it indeed looks like John Metchie, who made the tackle after Cowboys safety Juanyeh Thomas made the catch, is showing he'll go for the block before dropping back into coverage.
For a coaching staff probably trying its best to make it to the end of the season, sequences like that one have to really sting.
The Cowboys running fake punts by throwing the football twice in a three-week span is a good way to describe how the season is going: The team seems to be checked out and dying to get to January to clock out after a long, long shift. Even still, the product needs to be cleaned up.
There are still seven more games on the Cowboys schedule and these sort of mistakes are inexcusable.
