With the answer back in their backfield, Cowboys’ offense ignores Zeke

When the Dallas Cowboys needed him most, they didn’t call his name.

With the ball on the Seattle Seahawks’ 2-yard line and trailing by nine points, the Cowboys refused to give the ball to running back Ezekiel Elliott on four consecutive plays and were forced to attempt a 34-yard field goal. Dan Bailey missed it with less than six minutes remaining in the game.

Dak Prescott rushed for a yard on 1st and 3 at the 3, but a holding call on an incomplete pass made it 2nd and 12.

“It was a play that he could have given it to me or he could have kept it,” Elliott said of Prescott’s run-pass option on first down. “They were playing the run in the red zone. The safety was basically lined up as a linebacker.”

Prescott was then sacked for a 11-yard loss. A 7-yard completion to Jason Witten wasn’t enough and Bailey missed the field goal.

“My job is not to coach. It’s not to call plays, so I do what coach tells me,” said Elliott, who finished with 97 yards. “Coach [Scott] Linehan has been doing this for a long time and he knows what he’s doing so I trust his judgment.”

Cowboys fans were screaming for Elliott and booed lustily the series of play-calling.

Elliott was playing in his first game after serving a six-game suspension for violating NFL rules.

“In hindsight, we all wish that we’d tried Zeke in there,” Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones said. “They were really stacking it up for us, we all understood that. We’ve seen and had a lot of good things happen for us with Dak faking that ball in there and keeping it himself. But at the end I’d like to have them all back down there and just tried to see what we could do with Zeke all the way up in there. But we all know how that works.”

Apparently, we don’t all know.

This story was originally published December 24, 2017 at 6:16 PM with the headline "With the answer back in their backfield, Cowboys’ offense ignores Zeke."