Jason Garrett has received a lot of criticism for his decision to call three straight runs while up, 16-13, with 3 minutes 36 seconds to play in Sunday’s game in New England, perhaps the harshest of which came from his boss. “We rolled the dice at the end and went conservative,” the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, said, ”and it bit us. You always second-guess whether or not we should have tried to run a little offense down there instead of running it three times.”
Jones is often misguided in his critiques of coaches and players, but this one is spot-on. Garrett’s decision to keep the ball on the ground late in game was the wrong one for several reasons, not the least of which is that running the ball was statistically inferior to passing on each of the Cowboys’ three offensive plays. There is some evidence of this in Advanced NFL Stats’ Win Probability Graph, which showed that the Cowboys’ odds of coming out victorious dropped from 85 percent at the start of the drive to 74 percent within two plays. With only a few minutes to play and the ball in the hands of your offense, an 11 percent dip is rather significant.
Of course, those percentages would be different had the Cowboys executed Garrett’s calls, but was there really optimism to think the offense would do anything but go three-and-out if ordered to run? The Cowboys were averaging just 3.67 yards per carry up until that point, with 17 of their rushing yards coming on a fluky Tony Romo scramble. Only 22.2 percent of their runs went for more than four yards.
Defenders of Garrett might argue that Dallas had held Tom Brady to 6.59 yards per attempt and the Patriots to 13 points through 57-plus minutes, so there was reason to believe they could halt New England if the ground attack stumbled. With 3:36 to play and the Pats having a full arsenal of timeouts, however, the approach should have been more focused on moving the ball in a positive direction rather than running down the clock. A failure to record a first down, as we witnessed, put the Patriots in a situation similar to one in which they may have found themselves had Dallas gone three-and-out using its regular offense.
The obvious drain-the-clock offensive strategy was ineffective, and by the time Brady took the field, New England was equipped with 2:31 and a timeout. On top of that, the notion that Brady was somehow significantly less likely to move the ball for at least a game-tying field goal simply because the offense sputtered a bit prior to that final drive is magical thinking. No N.F.L. coach should feel safe when Brady’s Patriots are within one score and have possession, especially with over two minutes to play.
The same sort of gambler’s fallacy that may have been the origin of Garrett’s misconceptions about his defense’s chances of thwarting Brady was also probably a major contributor to his late-game play-calling. Garrett seemed to go conservative late because he failed in an ultra-aggressive approach that led to Dallas’s 24-point blown lead against the Lions two weeks ago.
Disregarding the fact that the game situations were drastically different, Garrett needs to improve at not allowing past results to influence present decisions. He shouldn’t shy away from consulting advanced statistics and using them in specific game situations. It’s like regularly hitting on 18 in blackjack. When you consistently disregard the numbers, the house (or home team) always wins.
Jonathan Bales is the founder of DallasCowboysTimes.com, a site dedicated to film study and statistical analysis of the Cowboys.
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