Tom Coughlin takes blame as New York Giants hand victory away

Tom Coughlin blamed himself. "It's my fault at the end of the game," the Giants head coach said after his team's 27-26 loss to the Cowboys on Sunday night. "There's nobody else to blame but me. The decision to throw the ball there on third down was not a good decision. It should have been a run, whether we scored or not."

Coughlin was speaking of a third-down play with 1:43 left on the clock. The Giants led 23-20 and had the ball on Dallas’s one-yard line. The Cowboys didn’t have any timeouts left. Anyone who has ever played a game of Madden knows the strategy here: run the ball. Get a touchdown, and you’re up two scores with less than two minutes left. Don’t and you take 40 seconds off the clock. Then you can go for it on fourth or kick a field goal.

Too much time

Eli Manning

dropped back to pass on third down, saw some pressure and threw the ball away. The Cowboys got the ball back down six with 1:34 left instead of under a minute. Wouldn’t you know it? The Giants left too much time on the clock, even though the Cowboys had lost Dez Bryant to a broken foot.

Tony Romo completed five passes on a six-play drive, hitting Jason Witten for his second score of the night with seven seconds left. Romo's throw to Witten was the latest game-winning touchdown pass in Cowboys history, according to NBC. The Cowboys had delivered a dramatic ending to a wild nightcap to the first Sunday of football this season.

The Giants led by 10 with eight minutes left. Dallas’s offence moved the ball all game, but New York’s D had forced three turnovers and put itself in a position to win. Then it gave up consecutive 70-plus yard drives to Romo and the Cowboys in the final eight minutes. The whole team gave dispirited quotes afterward. “I’m sick right now,” Justin Pugh said.

Coughlin rambled at his press conference. “The clock would have at least given us the opportunity to take a few more seconds off,” he said. “We could have run the ball, the clock would have run, run, run, take a timeout, kick a field goal. So, that was a bad decision, nobody to blame but me.

“The game should have been handled in a different way there at the end. In all of those situations, I am very, very reluctant to do anything but score. Sometimes people go out of the way; I am very reluctant to do anything but score. Obviously a touchdown puts you back up 10.”

Infamous

It was as if Coughlin were saying the Giants had zero chance to score there on a run. They’d already scored on a Rashad Jennings one-yard run after a Trumaine McBride interception and return earlier in the game.

Of course, the Giants' defence allowed the Cowboys to come to down the field in 90 seconds and Coughlin's play call went from forgettable to infamous. It's not quite Joe Pisarcik fumbling a handoff on what should have been the last snap of the game and it definitely didn't cost them a Super Bowl. But giving away a game to a division rival isn't something fans are going to soon forget. This could be an all-timer. – (Guardian service)