The Dallas Cowboys have a special teams problem, and it may have come to a head in the waning minutes of Sunday night’s loss to the Minnesota Vikings. Over the past several years Dallas has watched their unit decline from one of the better groups to one of the worst. In their dominating win against the Giants the week before, it came close to biting them, twice. In the Week 10 affair against Minnesota, it snuffed out a last-ditch effort to claim a game that should have been theirs.

When Cowboys punt returner Tavon Austin called for a fair catch before a failed last-gasp drive, the common reaction from fans and analysts alike was confusion. It’s a coaching gaffe in a long string of them on the Cowboys’ less than special teams unit.

Or was it?

Dallas trailed by four points with less than 30 seconds in a game that was going to require a miracle. The Vikings were fearful of a full-on attack on their punter to the point they had no gunners sprinting downfield towards Austin as the kick sailed towards him.

Austin called for a fair catch despite the field in front of him being set up for adventure.

After the game Austin was asked why he didn’t attempt a return in a situation that seemed so obvious, answering simply, “I’m just doing what I was told.”

There’s the rub.

A player following a coach’s command is a tale as old as time. Those who don’t find themselves job hunting in short order. But when head coach Jason Garrett appeared on 105.3 The Fan the following morning, he was signing a different tune, saying it was Austin’s decision.

“You lay out the situation: let’s not waste a lot of time,” Garrett said. “If you don’t have a real good opportunity here to go make a return directly north and south, don’t waste a lot of time. In that situation, the way he saw it, he went ahead and made the fair catch and gave us the opportunity around midfield. In hindsight, when you look at it, there might have been an opportunity for him not to do that and hit it north and south and see if we could make some yards on it.”

So the player said he was told to fair catch the ball. The head coach said the player had a choice there and it appears that the coach is throwing the player under the bus.

It got more befuddling later Monday during Garrett’s press conference when he went into more detail, citing communication issues.

“Yeah we didn’t communicate that well enough. In that situation you’ve got a couple of different options. You can try to block the punt and we decided not to do that. We decided that we thought there’d be a good chance that we could get the ball around the 50-yard line. The biggest coaching point for Tavon was make sure you don’t bleed the rest of this time off by spending a lot of time trying to return the ball. So fair catch was very viable option. The part of it that didn’t communicate well enough was just simply if you do feel like you have a good return opportunity, take advantage of it. Catch it and go north and south and get as much as you could. We did a poor job as a staff making sure he understood that and hopefully we’ll learn from that experience.”

If Garrett thought his player had the green-light to try to make a play in the return game, and Austin clearly didn’t, the most likely culprit for the poor communication would be special teams coach Keith O’Quinn.

Combining Jones’ words with Garrett waffling points to there being a big breakdown and 105.3 The Fan’s Jesse Holley is reporting that to be the case.

The Cowboys third unit has been a nightmare. When the Week 9 game against the Giants was close, 13-12 and then 16-12 in favor of Dallas, they gave up back-to-back kickoff returns of 50 and 41 yards to Cody Latimer. A better offense would’ve taken advantage of those short fields for more than the three points New York managed.

This year Dallas struggles to make any kind of positive play on their own returns, let alone an explosive kind, to help put its offense in position for easy scores. The team’s longest punt return on the season is 15 yards. Their longest kickoff return is 28 yards.

This, perhaps more than anything, is what makes this particular play so frustrating. It was the rare chance for the kind of big play Dallas hasn’t been the beneficiary of since Austin’s huge returns in the playoff victory over Seattle.

O’Quinn doesn’t have the resume to deserve the benefit of the doubt at a time like that. His unit is costing the Cowboys in big, albeit quietly, ways. Since taking over the job for Rich Bisaccia (who is now in Oakland) in 2017, special teams in Dallas has been below average. Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric shows a major decline in the ST unit’s quality.

Coach Year DVOA Rank O’Quinn 2019 -1.6% 25 O’Quinn 2018 -2.1% 23 Bisaccia 2017 4.6% 7 Bisaccia 2016 1.6% 9 Bisaccia 2015 1.8% 11 Bisaccia 2014 0.9% 13 Bisaccia 2013 3.4% 8

Pro Football Focus graded Dallas as the 27th-ranked special teams unit for 2018 and has them at 25th this season.

The knee-jerk reaction would be to blame it on kicker Brett Maher taking over for Dan Bailey, but that reaction would be wrong.

While Bailey helped buoy the unit in previous years, his worst season came in 2017 where the Cowboys delivered their best season on special teams. That year, from just extra points and field goals alone, was the seventh-worst in the entire NFL. The problems run much deeper than the largely unreliable Maher.

The Cowboys still have an opportunity to make something of this season, but in-fighting can often lead to the unraveling of a team.

This is clearly a coaching issue, and despite Garrett’s constant post game refrain citing all three units on the team, this is an area that is costing them games. It is most likely too late to do anything about it now midstream, with the head coach fully on the hot seat, but it’s an area of the 2019 Cowboys that has to get better in short order on the field. And if this becomes the start of problems in the locker room, then that makes things even rougher.