The Cowboys had the Ravens dead to right. Down three, the Cowboys reached the Baltimore 2 on a questionable pass-interference penalty with 23 seconds remaining. Dallas even had a final timeout in its pocket.
The Cowboys ended up kicking a tying field goal, and then lost in regulation.
“Yeah, we thought we were going to score a touchdown,” Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer said. “We thought we were going to score a touchdown and move the ball really well down there. We’ve got to find a way to punch it in. I’ve got to call some better plays to get it in.”
Time management and game management issues cost the Cowboys in the 34-31 loss, which was decided on Tyler Loop’s field goal on the final play.
Prescott threw incomplete on a fade to George Pickens on first down from the 2 before tight end Luke Schoonmaker was called for a false start.
“It can’t happen,” Schottenheimer said. “Schoony knows that. At the end of the day, we were down there low. I liked the call that we had. But you move us back. It definitely hurts, because there’s a couple of things that we had that we felt really good about down there low.
“No one coached or played a perfect game tonight, and unfortunately, that was a big play in the game — just like some of the mistakes I made.”
On second down from the Baltimore 7, Dak Prescott scrambled for 2 yards and the Cowboys called a timeout with 14 seconds left. That left too much time for the Ravens, because on third-and-goal from the 5, Prescott hurriedly threw the ball away.
Schottenheimer took the blame for the third-down play.
“We called a quick out,” Schottenheimer said. “I probably overcoached Dak on that one, because we had the points. And I probably overcoached him on that, because it had to go to — with the time, no timeouts — it had to go to GP [Pickens] or [Prescott had to] throw it away. . . . That’s on me. I overcoached him.”
Pickens indeed came back to the pylon and was open for what likely would have been the winning touchdown. Prescott confirmed he was throwing it away and said he’d like it back.
“I probably should’ve just sat on it a little bit longer. Sank on my back foot and just put it on that front pylon,” Prescott said. “Definitely should have.”
Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey kicked a 23-yard field goal with seven seconds left to tie it, and the Cowboys kept tripping over their own feet. They had Aubrey boot the kickoff into the end zone, eating no time and allowing the Ravens to start at their own 35.
Aubrey had kicked two kickoffs out of bounds earlier in the game, allowing the Ravens to start at their own 40-yard line.
“We felt like, let’s boom it through, put them out there, make them throw the ball short, and we’ll be fine,” Schottenheimer said. “Play for overtime. That’s what the plan was.”
Instead, the Cowboys played man defense instead of an umbrella defense, a decision NBC analyst Mike Tomlin called “negligent.” Lamar Jackson completed a 27-yard pass to Zay Flowers in the middle of the field to the Dallas 38 and called timeout with one second left, allowing Loop to end the game.
“I liked the [defensive] call,” Schottenheimer said. “We wanted to stay sticky. But at the end of the day, they ran two ins. It’s actually a play we run quite a bit of. The bottom line is you’ve got to make the ball go to the first one, not the layer that they hit to Zay Flowers. That’s where we have to be better.”
The Cowboys had a 77.5 percent chance of winning with 20 seconds remaining, according to ESPN analytics. They lost anyway, and they have only themselves to blame.