Dallas Cowboys' Dak Prescott addresses coin-flip controversy: 'Bad use of words by me'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott took some of the blame for Sunday’s controversy surrounding what he called during the coin flip before a game against the Los Angeles Rams.
Prescott, who led the Cowboys to a 44-21 win with 212 passing yards and two touchdowns, told the referee what his team wanted to do when they won the coin flip. He was heard giving referee Walt Anderson a bevy of answers, including “kick,” play “defense” and then “defer.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The FOX broadcast picked up the back-and-forth between Prescott and Anderson.
At first, Anderson ruled that the Cowboys chose to kick, which would have given the Rams possession of the ball to begin the first and the second half. However, the referees convened at halftime and determined that Prescott did say “defer” and gave the Cowboys the ball at halftime.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Prescott addressed the confusion after the game.
“Definitely a weird start. We wanted to set adversity there instead of on the field, so we could play from behind immediately. Just bad use of words by me. We listened to the audio. We got it figured out. Just wasn’t the cleanest coin flip I’ve been a part of,” he said during the postgame press conference.
Prescott later admitted he said a “little bit of everything.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}DeMarcus Lawrence, who was alongside Prescott during the coin flip at midfield, said he was partially to blame for the incident.
“We was gonna receive the ball, but I wanted to defer,” Lawrence said. “But once you said kick, that means you’re kicking off and you got to kick off the second half? I don’t know. We was supposed to say defer. That was the little confusion, but it’s all good.”
NFL’s supervisor of officiating, Al Riveron, made the decision to use a rule that would allow officials to use replay for “game administration issues.”
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“If you look at what happened, you see that the Cowboys actually say three different things, and then we hear at the end where they say, ‘defer,’” Riveron said, according to the pool report. “So we go ahead and look at it. We pulled up the audio. We knew that I was going to have a conversation with Walt Anderson at halftime to make it right.”