Funny thing is, the current Kansas City coach is one of the game’s best. In 19 seasons as an NFL head man, he has amassed 183 wins and has taken his teams to 24 playoff games, 5 conference championship games, and a Super Bowl, in 2004, when his Eagles lost to the Patriots. His résumé speaks for itself. But his playoff work comes up short. He’s 11–13 overall in the postseason and 1–4 with the Chiefs. There are plenty of reasons for that, but one of the major problems is surely his shortcomings in late-game management. As good a coach as Reid is, he often leaves me scratching my head (or yelling at the TV) after making the same mistake again and again.
Here’s what I’m talking about. The game is in the fourth quarter with two minutes and a few seconds on the clock, and Reid’s team needs the ball back. On second and 10, the opponent calls a running play. The defense holds for a short gain, and Reid uses his last time-out to stop the clock once more before the two-minute warning. At that point I promptly lose my shit. Worse, no one with a microphone and access to millions of viewers bothers to point out what a huge blunder this is or suggest that it might be time for Reid to outsource his clock management.
Calling a time-out in this situation is a gift to the opponent, providing more options for the offense. Thanks to Andy’s ill-timed time-out, the offense can throw on third down without worrying that an incompletion will help the Chiefs by stopping the clock. The two-minute warning is going to do that, anyway. If Reid lets the clock run to the two-minute warning, though, everyone in the stadium knows the offense will be running the ball on that crucial third down to keep the clock running.
Once it ticks past 2:06, the defense has to let it run down to the two-minute warning. Has to. When Reid calls that defensive time-out, he thinks he’s saving seconds for his offense. He’s not, but even if he is, he’s missing the point. For a trailing offense at that stage of the game, the entire focus needs to be on the potential number of plays it still can run. As football math has it, each play takes about six seconds. So, if you want to think like a coach, don’t look at the clock and think there are 54 seconds left in the game. Think: Best-case scenario, I have time to run nine more plays. When a team is down late and the game is on the line, offenses have to recalibrate to value plays more than time and yards more than first downs. The goal is to win. To win you need points. To get points you need yards. To get yards you need plays—but more than the three seconds Reid saved.
Defensive head coaches should be able to do the plays-to-time-left calculation in their heads, but the shrieks coming from my den every weekend are proof that they can’t. If Reid were Al Davis’s head coach, Davis might have watched him call that pre-two-minute-warning time-out—once. If he saw it again, Reid would be looking for a job. I’m not kidding. Davis understood game management theory. In fact, Bill Parcells, one of the best game managers ever, was schooled by Davis. Both Parcells and Belichick have been mocked for not celebrating after big late-game touchdowns, but it’s not because they’re joyless so much as because they’re already deep in thought about calculating time scenarios to decide the next thing the team needs to do. You can celebrate after the game.
When Reid faced Belichick in Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005, his Eagles were down 24–14 with 5:40 to go. I guess having two time-outs left robbed Reid of the proper urgency because to the amazement of the entire Patriots coaching staff and a worldwide audience, the Eagles started their next drive as if the game were still in the first half. They scored, but it took them an eternity—almost four minutes—which left them no time to see whether the defense could get them the ball back. The Eagles were forced to try an onside kick, which they didn’t recover. Almost 11 years later, Reid faced the Patriots again, this time with the Chiefs in the 2015 divisional round. Again his team was down by two touchdowns late, and again history—or should I say Reid?—repeated itself. With 6:29 to go and all three time-outs, the Chiefs took over with the same kind of non-urgency we saw in Philadelphia. They scored, but only after 16 plays that burned more than five minutes. Another desperation onside kick did not deliver.
Once again Andy Reid was left to suffer the same sad fate as Sonny.
COROLLARY 1: WHEN THEY THROW CHECKDOWNS IN THE TWO-MINUTE DRILL
When I was in Cleveland, I sat in on a film session with our scouts after a day spent working on our two-minute drill. Watching one useless checkdown throw—you know, those safe tosses to a receiver, usually a running back, in the flat—after another got me more and more annoyed until I finally had to say something. Most of the scouts in the room turned and looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues. To them it seemed obvious: We needed to get first downs.
To me it was just as obvious: No, we didn’t. (Unless it was fourth down, of course.) Last I checked, they don’t give points for first downs. What we really needed was the maximum yards we could get in the smallest amount of time. I tried to explain to those scouts that throwing a checkdown in that situation is actually a big-time favor to the defense because you voluntarily burn what you need most (time on the clock) in exchange for what you need the least (first downs).
When you measure the risk/reward as it relates to that situation, throwing the ball downfield seems like the only smart choice. Even if it’s down the middle of the field. Either you’re going to get a big chunk of yards or the pass is going to be incomplete and stop the clock. But to do that you have to have coaches and a quarterback who think like a professional golfer teeing off in front of a lake. That guy isn’t worried about hitting the ball into the water. He can’t even see the water. If he’s laying up with a short wedge to play it safe, he won’t be on the tour very long. He focuses only on what’s beyond the lake. Plunking one into the water never enters his mind.
That’s the way a quarterback and his coaches need to handle a two-minute drill. To be fair, it goes against almost all our normal training. We talk about completion percentages and accuracy and read progressions all day long, but in a two-minute drill that all has to go out the window as the quarterback looks downfield because—as crazy as it sounds—a long incompletion is much better than a five-yard checkdown.
COROLLARY 2: WHEN THEY DON’T CONSIDER ALL THE FACTORS
Let’s check in on the Falcons-Eagles 2017 divisional playoff game. The Eagles are up 15–10 with just over six minutes to play, but the Falcons are starting a drive that will determine their entire season. Eventually, after running four-plus minutes off the clock, Atlanta finds itself first and goal at the Eagles’ 9-yard line, on the doorstep of a second-straight NFC championship game.
The situation looks so dire for the Eagles that with 1:19 to play they call a time-out in an attempt to stockpile precious seconds for a last-ditch drive after the Falcons inevitably score.
Okay, time for a pop quiz: What should the Falcons call?
At this point in the game, they have two goals. Obviously, first and foremost, they want to score, but second and almost as important, they want to force the Eagles to burn their final time-out. Not for nothing: The Eagles’ kicker made a 53-yarder at the end of the first half, so if the Eagles do get the ball back, having that time-out to stop the clock and set up a kick could be the difference in the game. Knowing this, the Falcons’ first-down call has to be a run or an easily completable pass, right? Something that runs the clock and forces the Eagles to use their final time-out. Because once that happens, even a high school coach understands that Atlanta will have full control of the game. But what do the Falcons do? They throw a 50/50 pass into the end zone that falls incomplete. I’m sure there are many “experts” who would argue that this was smart, trying to get the ball to their best player, Julio Jones. Sorry fellas; right idea, wrong time.
On second down, the Falcons call a quick screen. Incomplete. The clock is now at 1:11. Forget for a moment that those two plays didn’t move the ball an inch closer to the end zone. The real problem is that they used up only eight seconds and the Eagles still have their
emergency time-out.
Talk about not understanding the whole situation. When a world-class pool player makes a shot, where she leaves the cue ball matters almost as much as pocketing the ball. An amateur at your local watering hole is thinking one shot at a time, but the pro is imagining the best way to run the entire table from the get-go. Falcons head coach Dan Quinn isn’t thinking like a pool shark. His goal needed to be centered on the big picture. He needs to see the entire field, not just the next shot or the next play.
Now it’s third down. A short completion. At least this causes the Eagles to burn their last time-out in order to set their defense and save clock. The clock now reads 1:05, but it almost doesn’t matter. Atlanta has completely botched this series. Even if the Falcons score on fourth down, the Eagles have more than enough time to get in field-goal range and win the game. The Falcons don’t score, of course. Quarterback Matt Ryan throws an end zone fade to Jones, who falls down and gets back up just in time for the ball to sail through his fingertips.
Before the ball even hit the ground, everyone was talking about how the Eagles’ defense heroically held and saved the season. Nobody even mentioned the real story: how the Falcons’ offense blew it. At least I don’t think anyone was. I was screaming my objections too loud to hear them if they were.
WHEN THEY TRY TO RUN IT BACK
Few things demonstrate a nearly total lack of understanding of even the simplest aspects of clock management than late-game kickoff returns. Here’s the situation: Team B, down to its last time-out and trailing by four with less than a minute left, fields a kickoff three yards deep in the end zone and advances the ball to the 22-yard line as eight seconds tick off the clock. The announcers, of course, begin to talk about what the offense now has to do. They have nothing to say about what just happened.
Well, I do.
What the hell were they thinking?
The geniuses on Team B just gave up eight seconds—or one or two extra chances to win the game—in order to lose three yards on the kick return. Here’s the math: The chances of breaking that return for a game-winning touchdown are virtually nonexistent. In 2017 only 4 of the 966 kickoffs were taken to the house. That’s a success rate below one-half of 1 percent. Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota, who had five game-winning drives in 2017, beat those odds all by himself. Even more to the point, just four teams in 2017 had an average after-kickoff starting point beyond the 25-yard line. (The Ravens were best at 27.8.)
Trust me, this obvious miscalculation would never happen in New England or anywhere else where the head coach understands time management even a little. In fact, Bill Belichick figured out early on that it actually made sense to lure the not-so-smart teams into making this mistake. Instructing his kicker to leave the ball short of the goal line, he forced a return that burned precious seconds. Teams should be smarter than this, but you’d be surprised.
WHEN THEY STRETCH FOR THE EXTRA YARD
What’s the number one requirement of a ball carrier? To score? Nope. To gain yards? Nope. The first rule of ball carriers is to protect the rock. Yet more and more, it seems, runners near the goal line extend their ball-carrying arm to break the plane or touch the pylon to get a TD. Similarly, ball carriers have taken increasingly to cradling the ball as if it were a loaf of bread. The problem is that defenses have gotten better at playing the ball and knocking it loose. Most defenses, in fact, run daily drills in which they practice stripping the ball. It’s time well spent when you consider that teams that win the turnover battle win the game nearly 80 percent of the time. (That’s from a Harvard study, so you can trust it.) Think about that stat the next time you see a runner expose the ball to stretch for a measly extra yard. Even near the goal line, I’m telling you, the risk is not worth the reward.
In New England, players are reminded that carrying the ball is a privilege. If a player abuses that privilege with fumbles or by carrying the ball carelessly, he will lose that privilege until he earns it back. Belichick would never encourage extending the ball near the goal line; he means it when he says he never wants the ball to be unprotected. Of course, there will be times when an overzealous Patriot ignores the edict. But even if he scores, he can expect to get an earful from his coach. God help him if the ball comes loose.
WHEN THEY SETTLE FOR THE LONG FIELD GOAL
Late in games, as soon as a team that’s down by at least two points gets anywhere near midfield, television producers slap that virtual line onto the screen to indicate where the field-goal kicker’s range begins. Now, you might think that it’s a cool innovation (graphics!) or a helpful visual guide, and I might even agree—if not for the fact that it actually highlights the wrong target. Remember, the line represents the outer reaches of the kicker’s range. Time constraints aside, why would that be any offense’s goal? The point isn’t to get into field-goal range. The point is to get into surefire field-goal range. This is no small difference. An offense that can move the ball just 11 more yards and decrease the length of the attempt from, say, 50 yards down to 39 has increased its odds of scoring points by more than 20 percent.
Too many teams grow significantly more conservative once they get the ball into field-goal range because they don’t want to give up the chance to get three points. But they shouldn’t just want a chance; they should want a real chance. Why pile more pressure on an already pressure-filled situation? Forcing a kicker to achieve at the edge of his capabilities in a must-make-it moment is not a winning formula. For a head coach, who needs to factor in weather changes, injuries, and his kicker’s fluctuating mental state, field-goal range has to be a moving target, not a static line.
COROLLARY: MISSED FIELD GOALS ARE ACTUALLY TURNOVERS
What has always bothered me about missed field goals is that they’re filed away in the wrong statistical category. They’re not missed field goals; they’re turnovers. Think about it: After a miss, there’s a change of possession and a loss of yardage as the ball placement is seven yards behind the original line of scrimmage. In 2017, kickers converted 69 percent (107 of 154) of field goal attempts from beyond 50 yards. That means that in a game of inches, an offense handed the ball over to the defense near midfield 47 times.
Sure sounds like turnovers to me. Why do we continue to pretend otherwise?
WHEN THEY DON’T GIVE THEMSELVES A CHANCE
There’s a moment in the fourth quarter of every close-ish game in which it transforms into an “onside kick game.” You know what I mean: A team is up two scores, and the only way an opponent can come back and win is if it manages to secure an extra possession with a successful onside kick. What’s funny, though, is how few of those games actually ever end that way. Teams are so focused on scoring a touchdown first that they fail to leave themselves enough time to kick a field goal even if they can get the ball back. I know the traditional thinking on this is that you want to hang on to the chance to win the game as long as possible (even if that chance is contingent on a miracle turnover or broken play), which means you don’t want to go for a field goal first because if you miss, the game’s over right then. But I’ve always thought such thinking is too rigid. You need two scores; it makes no difference to anyone but the gamblers what order you get them in. Doesn’t it actually make more sense to move the ball into makeable field-goal range as fast as possible to give yourself the most time to get that touchdown?
I learned this by watching Parcells when he was coaching the Patriots. Whenever he found himself in an onside kick game, he’d factor in intangibles such as time-outs left, weather, the kicker’s confidence and range, and the moment a drive feels like it has stalled. But he was never afraid to follow his gut and attempt a field goal first even if it meant facing the wrath of the media and all the other armchair quarterbacks out there. You know why? Because it was the right move.
WHEN THE GOAL IS A THIRD AND MANAGEABLE
On first down the offense doesn’t gain any yard
age, which prompts the announcers to proclaim that it now needs to spend second down getting into a third and manageable situation, which then prompts me to proclaim that nobody knows anything. I’m sorry, but isn’t the goal to score? Who designs plays to gain three or four yards? Shouldn’t you call every play with the idea that it could break for a big gain? Look, I understand that sometimes you have to manage a situation and make keeping a drive alive your priority. But more often than not this is not the case. I might feel differently if third and manageable solved an offense’s scoring problems. It doesn’t.
The truth is, most NFL play callers don’t even understand what third down and manageable actually means. Most will define it as third and six. In the last few years, however, the average conversion rate for this down and distance has been about 26 percent. Getting in third and manageable might sound like a solid plan, but shouldn’t a solid plan have a success rate better than one in four? Third down in general is a tough position to be in. The game buckles down on third down. Defenses are designed for just such situations. Even the best teams convert third downs at only about a 45 percent rate. (The league average in 2017 was 38 percent.)
In the end, the best third-down strategy is to avoid third downs altogether.
Instead of teams trying to get into third and manageable situations, I propose that they’d be better off taking their cues from the Canadian Football League. I’m serious. The CFL gives offenses three downs, not four, so they never have to concern themselves with third and manageable because they have only two chances to make a first down. In the CFL, every play call needs to be aggressive.
Gridiron Genius Page 22