Forty-five seconds. Ninety-four yards. No timeouts. Trailing 19-12 to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Divisional Round on January 22, 2023, the Dallas Cowboys needed a miracle. What they got was a center who’d never played center in his life.
With six seconds remaining and the ball on their own 24-yard line, head coach Mike McCarthy and offensive coordinator Kellen Moore emptied the playbook — and then apparently emptied their heads along with it. Ezekiel Elliott, the two-time NFL rushing champion, the guy they once handed a six-year, $90 million contract to carry the football, lined up over the ball as the lone offensive lineman. Everyone else split wide. The idea, in theory, was to create space for a multi-lateral desperation play. The result, in practice, was a 340-pound nose tackle’s dream: one guy on the ball, no help, and a freight train coming.
Elliott snapped to Dak Prescott in shotgun and was immediately flattened by 49ers linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair. Prescott managed a short dump-off to KaVontae Turpin, who caught it eight yards downfield and was promptly destroyed by defensive back Jimmie Ward before he could so much as think about a lateral. Ball game. Season over.
McCarthy’s postgame assessment was as bare as the play design. “It didn’t get going,” he told reporters. “I really don’t want to get into detail on it, but that obviously wasn’t the plan. It’s obviously a gadget play or whatever to end it. It’s the last-play-situation call we practice.”
They practice it. Let that marinate.
The play drew immediate comparisons to the 2015 “Colts Catastrophe” — Chuck Pagano’s infamous fake punt against the Patriots that left one lineman protecting a safety playing quarterback. Same family of brain cramp, different uniform. And for the Cowboys, it was the second consecutive postseason ended by the 49ers on a final-play humiliation. The year prior, Prescott scrambled to set up a last-second Hail Mary but ran the clock out before anyone could spike it.
The Elliott-as-center play carries a particular sting now, two years removed. The Cowboys released him that March. He spent 2023 with the New England Patriots, who went 4-13 and missed the playoffs entirely. He returned to Dallas in 2024; the Cowboys went 7-10 and sat home in January again. Which means that snap — the one where a four-time Pro Bowl running back bent over a football and got trucked into next Tuesday — was the last time Ezekiel Elliott appeared in a postseason game.
A career that began with 1,631 rushing yards as a rookie, that led the league in rushing twice before his 25th birthday, that featured some of the most violent, downhill running the league had seen in a generation — and the final playoff image is a running back playing center on a gadget play that never had a chance.
Elliott averaged a career-low 3.8 yards per carry that 2022 season. Tony Pollard had overtaken him as the Cowboys’ primary back and made the Pro Bowl. The writing was on the wall. But nobody expected the last chapter to read like that.
The Cowboys still haven’t won a Divisional Round playoff game since 1996. They’ve now lost to the 49ers in the postseason on consecutive embarrassing final plays. And the last time one of the great running backs of his era touched a playoff field, he was snapping the ball.
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