At the end of the day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he had no good option in the 16-day government shutdown fight.

House Speaker John Boehner’s strategy collapsed. Ted Cruz’s push to use a shutdown to defund Obamacare was “not a smart play” and a “tactical error,” he said. And the country was staring at the threat of a prolonged shutdown and a potentially disastrous default on a nearly $17 trillion national debt.

Using a football analogy, McConnell said he got the ball on his own two-yard-line with a “shaky” offensive line and had to cut a last-ditch deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to end the crisis, no matter how unappealing to many in his party. Despite acting as a chief deal-maker in recent years during government crises, it was unclear the role McConnell would play until the final days of the bitter fight.

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“Given the card I was dealt at that point, what I had hoped to have achieved was to punt the ball to a better place on the field without raising taxes or busting the [spending] caps,” McConnell told POLITICO in a phone interview Thursday.

“We got off track with a tactical error earlier starting in July and August that diverted our attention away from what was achievable,” McConnell said bluntly of the defund Obamacare push. “And so we’ll be back at it in January and February, which is why the best you can say is, ‘It’s a punt.’”

Asked about Cruz’s contention Wednesday that had 46 Republican senators remained united they would have won the fight, McConnell said: “It’s pretty clear that 54 is more than 46 and the president of the United States thinks [Obamacare is] his greatest accomplishment.”

“It was not a smart play. It had no chance of success,” McConnell said of the defund Obamacare push.

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In the interview, McConnell said his ability to cut a deal wasn’t hamstrung by his campaign; argued he would dig-in to ensure the next fiscal fight didn’t exceed the spending limits set forth in the 2011 Budget Control Act; and stated bluntly that shutting down the government won’t change Obamacare if Democrats continue to control the Senate and White House.

As a leader of the party experiencing historic lows in the polls, with tea party activists unhappy with his deal and as he faces a potentially tough Democratic opponent in a state where he’s still unpopular, the shutdown fight could still haunt McConnell next year.

But McConnell insisted any political pain for the GOP will be “short-term.” And he took a whack at his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, saying there was “no chance” a freshman senator could craft the same kind of bargain the two leaders reached to bring an end to the shutdown and lifted the debt ceiling.

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McConnell’s handling of the fiscal crisis underscores the tricky political position he constantly found himself in throughout this fight: He couldn’t be seen as undercutting the conservatives in the House, even as he opposed their strategy of using the shutdown as leverage to defund Obamacare.

Asked if the deal would hurt his chances in a primary against conservative businessman Matt Bevin, McConnell declined to comment on his primary. But he offered up a stinging analysis of his Democratic opponent, Grimes.

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“What happened yesterday completely steps on the whole rationale for her candidacy, which is that somehow I’m part of what she calls the dysfunction in Washington,” McConnell said. “Look, I demonstrated on four occasions — including yesterday the most recent occasion, yesterday — that when the country is in crisis and something needs to be done on a bipartisan basis, I can step forward and get an agreement.”

Grimes, McConnell said, has had a “pretty bad 24 hours.”

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