Former Cowboys HC Jason Garrett: DEZ CAUGHT IT!!!!

More than a decade later, Jason Garrett will still go to his grave saying it. Dez caught it. The former Dallas Cowboys head coach relived the infamous playoff overturn on The Rich Eisen Show, and he has not moved an inch off his conviction.

Rich asked what the officials actually told Garrett on the sideline that day, the playoff game before Dak Prescott's time, when Tony Romo threw the ball and Dez Bryant appeared to make one of the great catches in postseason history. Garrett set the scene: Dean Blandino was in the booth, Gene Steratore was the game official, and the play was called a catch on the field.

The sticking point was the standard for a completion, and Garrett had heard it drilled into him a thousand times. "Time enough to make a football move," he said, repeating the phrase officials had told him again and again. "They'd say, they don't even have to make a football move. They just need time enough to make a football move." That language was ringing in his head as he watched Bryant catch the ball around the six-yard line in the air, switch it to another hand, get his feet down, and lunge toward the goal line before the ball came loose.

So Garrett made his case to Steratore in real time. "Time enough to make a football move? The guy made eight of them on his way down," he recalled telling the official. It was called a catch on the field, and the standard to overturn it, Garrett noted, was clear and obvious at the time. He could not accept that a play with that much possession qualified. "He literally had it for like five and a half yards and did eight different things with the football before he hit the ground."

The overturn, Garrett believes, traced back to the precedent set by the Calvin Johnson play. The league had boxed itself into a corner with the going-to-the-ground language, and the definition of a catch "just became a real mess" for years afterward until the rule was finally reestablished. Officials, he said, still deny it was a catch to this day.

His one real regret is not what he said, but what he failed to say. Asked about the play right after the game, Garrett stuck to the team's no-excuses code, pointing out there were 56 minutes before it and four minutes after and that Dallas did not get the job done. He does not regret sharing that. He regrets not recognizing the throw Romo made and the catch Bryant made, a play he compared to Terry Bradshaw to Lynn Swann over Mark Washington. "It was one for the ages," he said. "And I didn't fully recognize that."

The moment had a witness in the corner. A Dallas fan on the crew, Rich noted, was shaking his head the whole time, and finally erupted. "I'm having PTSD now just thinking about that," he said. "Dez caught it. If I live a thousand years, I'm going to go to my grave and say the ball was caught."

Garrett offered a broader theory too, agreeing with Rich that the catch rule never accounted for a physical freak like Bryant, a receiver who could gain a first down's worth of yards in the very act of securing the ball. Rich tied it to Charles Woodson's forever belief about the tuck rule, another play stitched into NFL lexicon. On that one, Garrett did not hesitate. "I agree with Charles, by the way."