By Michael Wilbon


The Washington Post


SAN FRANCISCO -- Down by ten points with six minutes left, on the road with little having gone right all day, it's probably a stretch to say the Dallas Cowboys could have caught the San Francisco 49ers. After all, the 49ers had the best offensive player on the field, Steve Young, and the best defensive player, Deion Sanders.


They were strategically and emotionally prepared, as evidenced by that 21-point explosion to start the NFC championship game. So whatever the Dallas Cowboys put forth in the fourth quarter was probably going to be a case of too little too late.


But if there was a flickering chance to stalk a threepeat with 6:20 remaining at Candlestick Park on Sunday, the Cowboys were going to have to come up with something imaginative and bold. There was going to have to be a stroke of genius, the kind of resourceful leadership and sense of urgency we've seen over the years from Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs, from Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnson and, yes, Marv Levy. A team comes to the point where it looks to the head man for a play call, a bold idea, a moment of inspiration, a trick up the sleeve.


With 6:20 remaining, the Dallas Cowboys needed such an input from their head coach. Not an assistant, not a coordinator, but Barry Switzer. And you know what he came up with? Nothing. Actually, a 15-yard penalty for bumping the head linesman is worse than nothing. Of all the miscues Switzer had to be responsible for Sunday against the 49ers, bumping an official with the game on the line was the dumbest.


True, it was still 38-28 in favor of the 49ers, but the Cowboys were driving. They'd crossed midfield and were facing second and ten, which is two-down stuff this late in the game, with this much riding. Troy Aikman went deep to Michael Irvin and Deion bumped Irvin at the goal line. It should have been a penalty, the ball spotted at the one, no question about it. Do you get mad? Yes. Do you call the zebras who missed the call every name in the book? Yes, because they blew the call and weren't going to throw a flag for being cussed.


But Switzer bumped the official on the sideline. Bumped him and admitted it. "I just demonstrated what they did on the field," Switzer reasoned later, "what the both of them should have called." That little demonstration took the Cowboys out of 49ers territory, back to their 44, and turned third and ten into an unthinkable third and 25. The Cowboys couldn't convert and that, ladies and gentlemen, was the ballgame.


The Bump wasn't Switzer's only goof-up, he goofed up all day, and it cost his team dearly. Down 21-7, he elected to hand the ball to an injured Emmitt Smith on third and and ten from the 49ers 12. Smith was stuffed, and the Cowboys were further deflated when Chris Boniol missed a 29-yard field goal try. Even worse, the Cowboys somehow let cornerback Larry Brown try and cover Jerry Rice one-on-one with eight seconds left in the first half, and you knew the rest, right? Touchdown. That was set up by three straight incomplete passes ran no time off the clock, and there was Young inside the Cowboys 40 with 30 seconds left in the half and a couple of timeouts. And all this came before the bump.


Yet, there was Switzer afterward, blaming everybody but himself. Now, the man who couldn't maintain what Jimmy Johnson built, finds out that staying out of the way for 16 weeks of the regular season isn't good enough practice for having to be a real head coach when the games really count.














I don't want to hear about an offensive coordinator or play-caller; down 21 points, the head coach has to be involved on that call if none other.








"If they make the call," Switzer said, "we've got it down there (at the one), and I promise it's going to be 38-35 with six minutes left and a helluva finish.'' If Switzer keeps his hands to himself, Aikman might keep the drive going and score anyway withsay, five minutes left.


The larger point here is, don't let anybody, even the owner of the team, tell you that a million people could coach the Dallas Cowboys. If so, Jerry Jones somehow missed getting a guy in a pretty large pool. The man who should still have been coaching them, Jimmy Johnson, was on a TV set, overlooking the whole thing and undoubtedly enjoying every second of it.


But at some point, just staying out of the way wasn't going to be good enough. Barry Switzer was going to have to contribute something meaningful, and he couldn't, or didn't, do it.


Asked in the dressing room after the game if he expected to be second-guessed for replacing Johnson with Switzer, a man with no pro football experience who'd been away from football of any kind for five seasons, Jones said, "Yes, I think there will be a lot of speculation as to what we could have done out here today if Jimmy was the coach. That's probably the likelihood. I expect it."


And rightfully so. Let's recap:





But that wasn't good enough for Switzer, who must have thought he was back in Norman, Oklahoma, on one of those lazy Saturdays, playing Kansas State with a Big Eight crew.





Switzer has said all year the best thing he could do was stay out of the way of a championship team, and he was right. Instead, d