Bill Belichick, where have you gone?
When the NFL’s guru of situational football can barely get one team to interview him for a job, the other coaches have demonstrated that they lack basic knowledge of clock management and when to use timeouts when the season is close to ending.
Not the others, that is. There were two of them. throughout the same game.
Frankly, it’s astounding that Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles neglected to call his final timeout after the Lions took a knee on third down with 36 seconds remaining in the game, and that both Lions coach Dan Campbell botched the timing of the players, including quarterback Jared Goff, taking their knees in victory formation.Baker Mayfield, the quarterback, let him).
While blaming the coaches is appropriate and simple, both organizations completely failed to work the clock—from Detroit’s standpoint—and recognize that it wasn’t being done correctly—from Tampa’s perspective.
The Bucs coach Todd Bowles should be held accountable for failing to call the timeout. The fact that nobody else did is also perplexing. On Wednesday’s PFT Live, Simms and I talked about this (again), and I made the following point: Peyton Manning would have called the timeout on his own if any of his previous head coaches—Tony Dungy, Jim Caldwell, John Fox, Gary Kubiak, Jim Mora, and Jim Mora—had forgotten to do so.
This isn’t sophisticated material. Every Madden player is familiar with how to handle the timer. Situational football at its most basic. With 36 seconds remaining from the Tampa 32 in a one-score game, Bowles failed to force the Lions to try a field goal, punt, or go for it. How can ownership trust Bowles to make wise decisions going forward?
Do you think the Bucs would have prevailed? No. However, there was a potential that they wouldn’t lose if they had used the timeout. Their win percentage was zero since they did not request a timeout. It’s the most fundamental analysis based on analytics. In that case, always, always, always call a timeout.
Turn it over. Campbell was fantasizing of biting 49er kneecaps and avoided a gunshot. He did not instruct Goff to let each play end with the play clock running down to one second. (Once more, Peyton Manning, the quarterback, wouldn’t need to be told.) At one point, when the Lions took a knee with plenty of time still on the play clock, referee Bill Vinovich made an irate gesture toward the scoreboard.
Imagine if the Bucs had requested a timeout. What if they’d converted the two-point attempt and scored a touchdown? Imagine if they had prevailed in overtime. Campbell may not have been able to recover from the loss of the team’s first NFC Championship berth since 1991.
The instant the football-watching world shifted its focus to Chiefs-Bills, less attention was paid to the error. Bucs-Lions moved down the list of Monday talking topics a little bit since Chiefs-Bills produced another masterpiece.
One should not overlook this moment. Men who occupy two of the thirty-two most sought-after positions in America committed egregious, preventable, inexplicable errors simultaneously in the same game. Their players and staff also let them to do so.
It should become an instant case study on how to manage and not handle end-of-game circumstances for every football coach at every level, as a longtime reader of PFT pointed out today. In fact, going even further, it need to force companies to appoint those who possess the knowledge and the courage to warn the coach that he is on the verge of making a grave mistake.
A chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers examines the link between extreme obedience to authority and plane catastrophes. In essence, even when their lives are in danger, the crew remains silent because they are programmed to defer to the established hierarchy even though they know the captain may crash the aircraft.
It would be prudent for NFL companies to take advantage of the Bucs-Lions issue to make sure that there are voices that don’t bow down to the coach. Astute individuals who sense an impending negative event and express their feelings. Maybe a player with the authority to speak up.
On Sunday, neither the Lions nor the Bucs had that. The Bucs need that by September. The Lions also need it by Sunday.
