Dallas Cowboys play victim, throw referee pity party after loss to Arizona | Opinion
Excuses start at the top of a locker room, and Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy needs to cork the pity party the team threw after its loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday at AT&T Stadium.
Listening to the Dallas Cowboys talk after their 25-22 defeat, it sounds like Wade Phillips was hired as an excuse consultant this week.
No one loved a good excuse more than Uncle Wade.
“We are still a good team, even though we were facing two teams tonight,” Cowboys defensive end Tank Lawrence said.
I asked him who were the two teams.
“I’m going to let the NFL handle that. I know there’s a possibility we see both of these teams in the playoffs,” he said. “Hopefully the NFL can sit down with their team, review the film, learn from their mistakes and get better from it.”
Give Tank an A for Clever Insults.
Ref blaming is a dangerous game, and the Cowboys played the victim card at the wrong time. This starts with the head coach, and McCarthy can’t play this unwinnable game.
Players will parrot their head coach, every time.
As many mistakes as the refs may have made on Sunday, the Cowboys made a few more.
The Cowboys gripes about the officials may have been valid, and equally true is that they were kicked around by the Cardinals and AT&T Stadium owner Kyler Murray for the second straight year.
“The refs, I feel like, dictated that game,” Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb said after the loss. “I mean, it’s no secret.”
Strong words, so I asked Lamb if he felt the refs took the game from the Cowboys.
“No, we just didn’t get into a rhythm,” he said. “We could have played better.”
I asked Cowboys linebacker Leighton Vander Esch if he could see Cardinals running back Chase Edmonds cough up the ball near the sideline with 2:51 remaining, and if he thought it was indeed a fumble.
“It was totally a fumble,” LVE said.
Edmonds was ruled down on the field, so there was no fumble call. And because the Cowboys were out of timeouts, they could not challenge the ruling, and thus had no chance at regaining possession.
Replays showed it looked like the ball came out before Edmonds’ knee was down.
“I just don’t understand how, with the technology we have nowadays, even if we don’t have timeouts or whatever it may be, to call a challenge. It’s so obvious,” LVE said. “Certain things are so obvious in the games the refs are messing up. Why aren’t they fixing it? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
“To me, we are playing more against the refs than we are the other teams.”
I asked him if he thought this was specific to Sunday’s game, or a season-long issue.
“It’s been multiple times this season. If you look around the league, this isn’t just the first time it’s happened. There have been other games around the league that have been dictated from just, I don’t know if it’s incompetence or what it is. It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.
“It’s not hard to fix that. If it’s so blatant on the field and so obvious, why the [referee in the replay booth] isn’t radioing down, ‘Hey, get this right.’ That’s not hard. That’s the ethics of the game. Getting it right. ‘Hey, you made a mistake here, get it right. Here is the right call.’”
McCarthy tried to warn his players that referee Scott Novak’s crew tends to be liberal with the whistle. As Pro Football Hall of Fame voter Rick Gooselin noted this week, Novak’s crew ranks fourth in penalties among the league’s 17 units.
The Cowboys were penalized 10 times for 88 yards on Sunday. The Cardinals were penalized seven times for 45 yards.
In the other Cowboys’ game called by Novak’s crew, they were penalized 11 times for 96 yards. But you probably didn’t hear too much complaining about the referees that night since the Cowboys defeated the Vikings in Minnesota in Week 8.
The numbers say LVE has a point. This season, the Cowboys have drawn the most flags and are the second-most penalized team, by yardage, in the NFL behind the Las Vegas Raiders.
Even Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott put in his toe in the party saying, “I think we’ve got to do a better job of trying to keep [the referees] out of it, but as I’ve said, I’ve become accustomed to it. I understand wearing the star and what it means. Sometimes things don’t go your way.”
Like what? No league wants a team to succeed any more than the NFL does the Dallas Cowboys.
Also, it doesn’t matter.
The referees had nothing to do with the Cowboys’ inability to run the ball.
The referees didn’t make quarterback Dak Prescott lose a fumble during a second-half scramble.
The referees didn’t force McCarthy to burn a timeout early in the third quarter before a Cardinals’ field goal try.
The referees didn’t allow the Cardinals to roll up 399 yards of offense, and finish 7-for-16 on third downs.
All of these guys are right. The referees were terrible because all refs, everywhere, are just terrible.
But don’t blame them because you lost, and drop the Wade Phillips excuse routine.
