things kevin hates

If you’re second-guessing anything from the Saints’ 26-23 win over the Falcons, it’s probably that fake field goal late in the 4th quarter. I’ll get back to that later, but the real mistakes were a few clock management errors that made the result far closer than it should have been. First, the Saints didn’t run enough time off the clock at the end of the 1st half, enabling the Falcons to mount a scoring drive of their own; second, the pass-happy playcalling on the drive leading up to that fake field goal let the Falcons save their timeouts and gave them more time to drive down the field for a tie or win.

First, let’s look at the end of the first half. (Play-by-play summary available here.) After Reggie Bush’s best punt return of the season, the Saints took over at their own 34, then methodically marched down the field, converting two third downs along the way, before coming to the two minute warning with the Saints playing a 1st-and-10 from the Falcons’ 19. A pass to Pierre Thomas gave the Saints a 1st-and-goal at the 7-yard-line, with 1:54 on the clock after the play. At this point the Saints essentially have a maximum of three plays (barring some defensive penalties) to get the ball in the end zone. I think the Saints had two timeouts left, which means the Saints can stop the clock if absolutely necessary. The Saints should be burning as much time as they can—the clock cannot hurt the Saints’ chances of scoring here, but leaving time on the clock can help the Falcons, who can expect to get the ball after a Saints touchdown or field goal. Obviously, priority #1 for the Saints is getting into the end zone, and you want to call whatever plays maximize those chances, but if you end up short of the end zone, you should be bleeding off as much time as you can. Instead, when the Saints could have run the game clock down to about 1:15, they snap the ball at roughly 1:35, leaving 20 seconds on the play clock! There is no need to do this! Even if you take the play clock all the way down, there is still plenty of time left to call whatever plays you like. Running a play too soon only helps the Falcons! The next play is a run up the middle for four yards. Here the Saints run about 30 seconds off the play clock, again leaving a few valuable seconds. 2nd down is an incomplete pass, then 3rd down is a Colston touchdown catch. 51 seconds remaining, but there should have been 30 seconds or less. Backup QB Chris Redman promptly marches the Falcons down the field, getting them inside the New Orleans 10 before having to settle for a field goal, which made it a seven point game at the half. Obviously the defense could have played much better on that drive, but there was no reason for the Falcons to have as much time as they had. Had the Saints lost, everyone would be talking about the fake field goal, but the bad clock management at the end of the first half was huge, and I’m glad it didn’t end up costing the Saints.

Let’s also consider the drive that led to that fake field goal. After a crucial interception by Jonathan Vilma, the Saints for the ball at the Falcons’ 32. A Pierre Thomas run and Devery Henderson catch gave the Saints 1st-and-10 at the Atlanta 18. Here the Saints were doing a good job of bleeding the play clock, and after a three-yard gain by Thomas, the Falcons took their first timeout with 2:23 remaining. The Saints would face 2nd-and-7. Sean Payton called a second down pass. Had it been 2nd-and-9 or 2nd-and-10, I think a pass would have been a good call—you don’t want to end up in third-and-long. But another three or four yards on 2nd down and you’re into a very manageable third down that can be gotten either on the ground or through the air, and you’ve either run the clock down to the two-minute warning or forced Atlanta to call another timeout. It’s hard to blame Sean Payton for trusting a guy who’s completing 70% of his passes on the season, but I think it’s better to rely on the running game here. Obviously I don’t want to be too results-oriented here, and I think the playcalling was debatable, as opposed to the first-half clock management, which was horrendous, but I do think that 2nd-down-call was questionable. And the incomplete pass pretty much committed the Saints to passing on 3rd down, which meant the Falcons would get the ball back before the two-minute warning.

As for the fake, I really don’t have a strong opinion either way. It’s worth noting that the Falcons still had two timeouts and the two-minute warning, so a conversion short of the end zone still would have meant the Saints needed a touchdown to completely ice the game—they wouldn’t have been able to run out the clock, and a field goal still would have left the Falcons down by just six points. That weighs against going for it—it wasn’t one of those situations where a conversion would have effectively meant game over (y’know, like when Belichick went for it on 4th-and-2). But the time burned off the clock, forcing the Falcons to use timeouts, and the chances of scoring the TD all would have made it much harder for the Falcons to come back and win it.

Whether the fake was a good idea or not really just depends on what the chances of converting it were, and those chances are very hard to estimate. But the point I’d like to make is that while it may have been a questionable call, maybe even a bad one, it would have been the talk of the town had the Falcons pulled out a win. And what would have been overlooked was the inexcusable clock management at the end of the first half, something that absolutely could have been prevented. Sean Payton can’t control whether a given play works or not—so much is up to chance. But he can manage the clock in a way that gives his team the best chance to win, and he failed to do that this week (and it wasn’t the first time, either). Obviously, the man is an offensive genius.

I saw a debate about these sorts of situations on a message board, and someone raised the point that to rise up through the coaching ranks, you usually coach a position, then act as offensive or defensive coordinator. None of those jobs has to be concerned with game management, and you’re not going to become a head coach because you were a superb game manager, but because you did a good job coaching an offense or defensive, or because you were an assistant coach on a successful team. (Obviously it’s possible to be a head coach in college and move to the NFL, or work your way up from head coaching small schools to bigger and bigger schools, but a great many NFL head coaches had no previous head coaching experience anywhere, not even as a high school coach.) Nowhere along these lines are coaches really forced to learn clock management, yet they’re somehow supposed to know this stuff magically once they become a head coach? It’s not that hard to figure this stuff out. One guy even wrote a book about it. Any teenage boy who plays Madden knows most of this stuff. (ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons even suggested that every team have a “17-year-old video game nerd as their Madden Late-Game Coordinator”; go here and scroll almost all the way down to the “Great Call of the Week” section; note, however, that his analysis is wrong.) But why do head coaches keep screwing it up? It’s really inexplicable that these guys work eighty or ninety hours a week breaking down film, coming up with game plans, and coaching their players, then ignore simple things that can make a huge difference in the outcomes of games. So Saints, if you wanna gimme a call, that’d be great. I’ll work for pretty cheap, too; you won’t need Sean Payton to kick in $250,000 of his own salary (like he did for Gregg Williams) in order to hire me.