Jason Garrett blamed everyone else for the Cowboys critical 4th and 8 play personnel decisions

There is no more hiding from it. The Dallas Cowboys are bad. With a chance to clinch the NFC East on Sunday the Cowboys couldn’t even beat a battered and broken Philadelphia Eagles team. Heck, they couldn’t even score a touchdown against the band of misfits that Philly trotted out to take back control in the division. It was embarrassing.

As football sometimes does, this game all came to a head in one play for the Cowboys. They were facing a 4th and 8 late in the game down by eight points. Obviously a touchdown was necessary for life in the game/season. In a moment of such consequence the Cowboys threw an offense on the field that did not feature Amari Cooper or Randall Cobb.

How could this be possible? In what world would it make sense to purposely - with three timeouts at your disposal to figure things out if need be - hinge all of your hopes on an offense that did not have Cooper or Cobb? It can’t be.

It was, though. And as if that wasn’t bad enough things - as they generally have this season - got a lot worse when Jason Garrett appeared on 105.3 The Fan on Monday morning. The head coach outright threw Kellen Moore and Sanjay Lal under the bus when asked who’s decision it was.

“In terms of the personnel group to have that be a 12 personnel play, that would be Kellen’s decision. That’s a play that we liked in that situation for the variety of coverages that they were going to play. We felt like we had good answers with that. In regards to the receiver rotation Sanjay Lal and... it’s just the communication during those on-the-ball drives. Sometimes those guys work the rotation different ways based on the routes they run and plays they’ve run and all of that.”

Now let’s be clear that this might literally be true. In fact, it probably is. It makes sense that Kellen Moore and Sanjay Lal would handle those things given their job titles (what is Jason Garrett handling by the way?), but for someone who is constantly heralded as a great leader it looks very bad for Jason Garrett to answer this question like this.

While it may not have been his intent Jason absolutely pushed Moore and Lal straight into oncoming traffic with this answer. Again, a head coach has to know better. What’s more is that Garrett has previously thrown someone under the bus this season (Tavon Austin) and dealt with the blowback from it. Not even two months later he hasn’t learned that lesson.

There are so many questions that we don’t have the answers to. Why the Cowboys wanted this personnel in this situation and when Jason Garrett will take accountability for it are two that will likely never be answered, unfortunately.