New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin is shouldering the full blame for his team’s loss to the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night.
Up three points with 1:43 remaining in the game, the Giants called a passing play on 3rd-and-goal from the 1-yard line. Rather than calling a run play that would result in a touchdown at best and chewing up more clock at worst, Coughlin called for a pass.
It fell incomplete, and the Giants settled for a field goal.
“It’s my fault at the end of the game,” Coughlin told reporters after the game, via Gregg Rosenthal of NFL.com. “There’s nobody else to blame but me. I take full responsibility for it because the strategy was wrong at the end.”
The Cowboys were out of timeouts, but that didn’t stop them from putting together a game-winning drive with 1:29 left in the fourth quarter. While Coughlin insists he should have called a different play to allow the clock to tick below one minute, Eli Manning was also quick to take responsibility.
“I gotta know that (to take a sack), 100 percent. I gotta know that,” Manning said. “I gotta know the circumstance and just don’t take a chance and take that sack and go into the next one; get a field goal and leave just a little bit of time left on the clock.”
No team makes or breaks its season in Week 1, but losing to a division rival like that has to sting. That said, it certainly wasn’t the most controversial goal-line play call we have seen this year.
