Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Hobbyhorse check: Even great coaches like Belichick and Reid insist on leaving the door open for beaten foes. Plus: Instant replay is not so instant.
Sep 26, 2005 | Can't anybody here manage the clock?
One of my hobbyhorses is the insistence by NFL teams on leaving time on the clock before attempting a game-tying or game-winning field goal.
Sunday two NFL teams pulled this bonehead move. But what did I expect? They were only the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, the defending conference champions coached by two of the most respected minds in the game, Bill Belichick and Andy Reid.
Neither decision cost the team making it the game. In the Pats game, the Pittsburgh Steelers mismanaged the clock too, and they almost certainly wouldn't have won had they not done so. But once in a while, these types of things cost teams games. Even the best teams never seem to get them right.
The Eagles' move was particularly jaw-dropping.
Philadelphia played the whole game with a hobbled kicker. David Akers, who hurt his right hamstring, his non-kicking leg, last week, aggravated the injury on the opening kickoff and could do nothing more strenuous than kick extra points and similar-length field goals the rest of the day.
Why coach Andy Reid, for whom roster management is a forte, didn't put another kicker on the roster Sunday, just in case, is a good question. Surely some special-teams soldier could have been spared for the afternoon, and mediocre kickers who can kick off to the 10-yard line and have a decent chance of hitting a medium-range field goal are loitering on street corners looking for casual labor.
Instead, the Eagles used a linebacker to placekick and a third-string tight end to kick off, with results that combined to nearly cost the Eagles a win over the Oakland Raiders, who enjoyed great field position all day and only had to stop the Eagles on downs to keep them from scoring. The linebacker, Mark Simoneau, even missed a PAT.
So the game is tied 20-20 in the final minute and the Eagles are driving. On first down from the Raiders 12 with 25 seconds left and no timeouts remaining, Donovan McNabb hits Terrell Owens over the middle at the 5. Twenty seconds to go, second and three. There's plenty of time for the Eagles to gather themselves, think about what to do and do it.
So let's think. You have a kicker who can barely walk. Your kickoffs have given the Raiders the ball at midfield all day. You don't want to leave enough time on the clock for Raiders quarterback Kerry Collins to throw a Hail Mary pass. You wouldn't give anyone that chance if you didn't have to, but Kerry Collins has Randy Moss on his team.
The play is to line up, let the clock run down below five seconds, the time it takes to kick a field goal, and spike the ball. The only risk is that someone will commit a false-start penalty in the last 10 seconds, which would cause a clock runoff and mean the end of regulation. But that would only mean overtime, and with no actual play running, why would anyone jump? The linemen don't even have to come out of their three-point stances when the ball's snapped.
And let's not even talk about that "in case of a muffed snap" argument, which is somewhere below "I carry a bomb on airplanes because what are the odds of there being two bombs on one plane" on the scale of understanding probability.
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