Point Blank – January 19
What a “Bettor Better Know” – Divisional Playoffs, and understanding football “Time”…Sebastian Saiz means more to Ole Miss than the early market reactions…
Football is often called a “game of inches”, and indeed it is. It is also a “game of seconds”, time being such a precious commodity. At least to some, because the inability to properly maximize those seconds is a reason why the Kansas City season is over, nearly a reason why Arizona might have lost on Saturday night as well, yet may have been something that Ron Rivera actually got right, despite many misgivings from others in the post-mortem of that one.
So with that as our starting point this week, and another long read ahead calling for a little musical background to carry you along, the theme is easy to tie in, a live version of “Time” from Pink Floyd in 1994. This is the post-Roger Waters era, but in many ways the song was played better as the others aged, perhaps feeling the words even more while watching their own days go by all too quickly, the inevitable side effects of mortality being realized…
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
And those are just the words needed to begin with Andy Reid…
Item: Andy Reid/Dave Toub put forth the worst single play of the NFL season
Reid’s end-game was simply terrible, which I will get to in a moment. But a sequence earlier in the 4th Quarter was even worse, literally as bad as football clock management can get. It not only rates as the worst play I saw all season, but continues to feed a pet peeve of mine in which professional coaches defy common sense.
Let’s start with the pet peeve – when you are trailing by more than a touchdown in the second half of a game, time is of the essence. You need to make plays to rally; the more plays you can extend the game with the increased opportunity you have to win. As such, any team with the ball on a 3rd down should have their punting unit lined up and ready to run into formation. Should the 3rd down fail, and fail on a play in which the clock has not stopped, getting the punt off quickly can save 30+ seconds. Yet how many teams do it? Follow the games closely, and you will see teams that are trailing routinely fail to grasp this basic concept, and allow valuable seconds to tick away.
Which takes us to Saturday, when a combination of Reid and Kansas City special teams coach Dave Toub, managed the unthinkable, hitting a true rock bottom.
The Chiefs had the ball at their own 20-yard line, 3rd-and-10, with 13:24 remaining, down 24-13 with a moving clock, the previous play having been a pass completion for no gain. With this offense, on 3rd-and-10 you damn sure get the punt team ready. So when Alex Smith got sacked to make in 4th-and-13, there was absolutely no decision about what to do – punt the ball away, and also get out there and do it quickly, saving as many of the 40 seconds on the play clock as possible.
They did not save any of them. It wasn’t just that the Chiefs did not get the ball away quickly, they did not get it away at all. That meant not only losing a valuable portion of the remaining game-time, but also being dealt a five-yard penalty for delay of game. It was an utterly preposterous football sequence. From the time Smith took the 3rd-down snap at 13:24, until the Patriots began the ensuing possession at 12:26, a major amount of time, and some not insignificant yardage, was lost. It is difficult to imagine a more elemental football mistake, and I was hoping to find an answer for it in the post-game digging. But none of the reporters on-site asked about it, largely because they had other things on their mind…
Item: Andy Reid botched the post-game even more than the end-game
Sub-Item: Welcome to your new HC (Doug Pederson), Philadelphia!
I do not need to rehash the details of how preposterous the final Kansas City drive was in terms of time management; that has been served up enough across the Sports Mediaverse, a legitimate case of shooting fish in a barrel. What does matter is the mind-set that led to it, because we do have to power-rate Reid in the future, and of course one other guy, Chiefs OC at the time Doug Pederson, who now wakes up each morning as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. One has to feel for the folks in that city, who had grown so frustrated by Reid’s game management through the years, only to now have to welcome a guy whose entire NFL coaching career has been under Reid.
Do you miss Chip Kelly already?
Here is the issue with Reid, a nonsensical post-game defense of his strategy that makes a bad sequence look even worse - "We work those situations all the time. We wanted to maintain our timeouts as best we could. We didn't want to give the ball back at any point back to New England after we go ahead and score that next touchdown. We had a penalty involved there. It wasn't a perfect world, not quite the way we wanted it. So we took a couple of shots to get it in, and we still had a 1:15 or 1:13, right around there. We potentially would have had three timeouts and an opportunity to drive the field, which I thought was huge. It would have put us in a perfect situation to do that. We work on that every week. So I thought that part was handled right.”
Many public figures have press agents; Reid could have used one. First, whether they gave the ball back to New England or not depended on recovering an on-side kick, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the clock. Nothing. Second, had the Chiefs executed properly before the two-minute warning, when they got a play off at 2:33, but then not another, a TD there and they could fail on the on-side kick, use all three time outs, and still possibly get the ball back again. That would have been optimal football strategy, and at this stage of the playoffs, one should expect optimal.
Was it Reid? Was it Pederson? Was it in not trusting Smith to call his own shots? Over time those notions will be sorted out, but it was simply an epic fail.
(By the way, the Patriots were also rather good, the offense averaging 6.1 yards per play without a turnover, with Julian Edelman returning in mid-season form to catch 10 passes. But since they have survived, I can talk about them more later in the week).
Item: Bruce Arians gave Aaron Rodgers enough time to complete 101 yards worth of passes to Jeff Janus
Can we put Jeff Janus up there with Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, and suggest that catching 101 yards worth of passes on a single drive is a record that will stand to the end of time? But in the record book there should be an * next to it: * - Bruce Arians enabled it to happen. Like Reid, there was some poor clock management, and it almost reduced the Cardinals chances of advancing to Carolina to a coin flip, literally.
You will remember the details – with 2:29 remaining in the game, and the Packers out of time outs, Arians called for a pass play on a 2nd-down, which went incomplete and stopped the clock at 2:29. The next play was a run, which took the clock down to the 2:00 warning. Had Arizona tried the run play on 2nd down, the first play after the 2:00 break could have been another run, which would have led to Chandler Catanzaro attempting a FG with about 1:10 to 1:15 remaining, instead of the 1:55 it was. As it turned out, those were valuable seconds; Janus not only caught those 101 yards of passes from Rodgers on one drive, all of it came with less than a minute to play (the first completion of the sequence was snapped at 0:55).
Arians has consistently maintained that he is an aggressive play-caller, and afterwards when discussing that pass play it was “Hell no. I never regret a call. … I play to win. Ten-point game, it’s over.” I read similar self-affirmations from a small handful of other coaches, one of them being Mike Leach in the college ranks. And a lot of it is purely donkey manure, a coaches way of flattering himself for putting a game outcome at risk (Leach has been bitten by this on multiple occasions).
Try this for a model. Two guys are standing on a street corner, wanting to get to the other side. One of them steps out into traffic, the other waits for the light to change. The guy that steps into traffic gets across faster on the occasions in which he succeeds, but also ends up being road kill when he does not. The guy that waits for the light gets safely across. Is the first guy aggressive, which is often considered a positive trait? Or is he foolish, not properly understanding risk/reward? Is the second guy conservative, or was he simply smarter?
The modeling also matters in another review, because Ron Rivera waited for the light to change (again)…
Item: Was Ron Rivera really too conservative?
From many accounts, Rivera’s end-game strategies were failures as well, a dominating 31-0 first half by his Panthers turning into a 31-24 final score. There are absolutely some degrees of truth to be found in that, from a psychological perspective, with that loss of momentum potentially getting into the heads of the players and coaches a bit. Use this oft-repeated quote from Cam Newton as your guide – “There was a lot of guys playing with their butts tight. Coaches with their butts tight. At one point, the fans and myself with butts tight, too. But you have to find ways to get your groove back going, and we need a little bit more of that next Sunday.”
That matters, because if Newton and others feel that there is a need to get the groove back, it means that they perceive it was lost. That would be a failure by Rivera. But as for winning a football game, the reality was not all that bad.
Carolina entered the fourth quarter leading by 17 points. The only way to lose would be to get shutout, and for Seattle to score three times. The Seahawks only got the ball twice. You can’t get 17 points out of two possessions.
On the last two Panther drives it might not have seemed like the offense was going anywhere, but 15 snaps burned up 9:04 of the clock. It would have been another 35 seconds or so, but Seattle used a timeout. That is efficient. On the last two Seahawk drives it might have looked like bad Carolina defense, allowing 10 points, but it took 20 Seattle plays to get those points, only one of them going for more than 16 yards. While some bemoaned a coverage scheme that sack back and seemingly let Russell Wilson pick them apart on the final two drives, he averaged 7.1 yards per pass attempt on them. During the regular season Wilson connected at 8.3. It may not have been pretty defense, but it was efficient.
As the week progresses I will be reading between the lines to see how much that fourth quarter may have impacted the psyche of the team, which is legitimate, but from the standpoint of managing the scoreboard and clock to secure a football victory, a lot of what Rivera did was actually textbook.
Of course, even what is textbook isn’t always textbook, as we find next…
Item: A quickie from the Sports Mediaverse
The folks at the Elias Sports Bureau do some interesting work, and I follow a lot of their send-outs to see if something of value can be gleaned. But sometimes it is just fingernails-on-chalkboard stuff, including times at which the information is actually misleading. Like this -
Newton's running game shut down by Seattle
It wouldn't be Elias Says without a bit of pure trivia, right? Cam Newton carried the ball 11 times on Sunday but netted only 3 yards. He became the seventh player with less than 10 yards on more than 10 carries in an NFL playoff game. Among the others were Cecil Isbell, better known for throwing more TD passes than anyone else to Hall of Famer Don Hutson, for the Packers in 1941; and Barry Sanders, who was held to minus-1 yard on 13 carries by the Packers in 1994.
How do they arrive at that? Because it is how the box score reads. But…
On the final three snaps of the game, the Panthers in their victory formation, Newton took a knee each time, for a collective loss of seven yards. Yes, those go into the official stats as running plays, a negative for the offense and an absurd credit for the defense (think about it – the defenses can only get this reward because they have lost the game). But those play results have nothing to do with the merits of football whatsoever. In reality Newton did not “carry” the ball 11 times. Those “victory” plays never enter my charts, they should not be in yours, and an organization as strong as Elias should know better.
In terms of the overall game flow, consider how much different the Carolina rushing offense, and Seattle rushing defense, look if it is 38-151, instead of 41-144. Those kneel-downs may seem trivial, but unless you edit them out, occasionally they can clog things up.
Meanwhile Denver playoff TDs could also fall under the mantle of being “trivial”, because they happen so rarely, but in terms of merit it is another matter entirely…
Item: 25 Possessions, Two TDs (the Denver post-season rate the last two years)
The Broncos opened their home playoff game vs. Indianapolis last January by going 68 yards in seven plays for a TD, aided by a 15-yard roughing-the-passer penalty along the way. The ensuing kickoff took place with 10:00 remaining in the 1st Quarter. The next time the Broncos would kickoff after a playoff TD came with 3:00 remaining on Sunday, a rather staggering 112 minutes of football time. What happened in between was not pretty, yet the stage is set for what will likely be the final Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady showdown.
The Denver offense was terrible on Sunday, and as bad as the statistics appeared, the eye test was even worse. There was an opportunity to break the game open early, with 1st Quarter possessions beginning at the Steeler 31- and 30-yard lines, but the Broncos could only manage a single first down, settling for a field goal each time. Their average drive started at their own 36-yard line, taking advantage of a miserable day for the Steeler special teams, yet just one trip made it to the end zone, and even that was not so much about their own merit, but rather a Pittsburgh defensive front that had worn down. The Steelers were playing for the fourth straight week on the road, and on the game-deciding drive the toll of the altitude had them starting to wobble up front, Denver marching 65 yards in 13 plays, with 10 of them runs. The Broncos were not blowing the Steelers off of the ball, with six of the runs for three yards or less (of course C. J. Anderson was only statistically entitled to one yard on his TD plunge), and none going for more than seven. But the Denver OL brought just enough leverage to keep the march going.
The Broncos went 22 post-season possessions in between TDs. That is ominous. Yes, the Sunday wind on the front range played a part, but Manning’s arm strength was painful to watch, and while some of the stat purveyors will show a high count of drops, I believe that several of them came because of poor throws, the ball getting there a fraction of a second later than usual, which can throw a receiver’s timing off.
There is much to be said about Manning’s abilities as a play caller. You could make a good case for him being the NFL’s all-time best in that category, using his vast knowledge and a deep playbook to work around whatever holes a defense has. But put that into the proper perspective this week – because of his physical limitations, that playbook has shrunk drastically. When he looks across at the Patriots there may be things the mind says to do that the body cannot execute anymore, which means that his greatest strength has been diminished. How about this - through 153 pass attempts at home this season Manning has only one TD toss, and eight interceptions.
As the AFC Championship game approaches, my Denver power ratings actually show the Broncos to be a slight tick better with Brock Osweiler as the starting QB, than Manning. And for what it’s worth, my power ratings the day after the Super Bowl will likely show Pittsburgh as the #1 team for 2016. Watching the depth of talent at the WR spots without Antonio Brown in the lead role was fascinating, and with a return to health of the RB corps, and the continuing development of some young talents in the defensive front (they do need a little help in the secondary), there is significant upside.
Item: Prop-shopping at the Westgate gets easier starting today
Once the Super Bowl matchup is set on Sunday night there will not be a busier crew anywhere than Jay Kornegay and his staff at the Westgate SuperBook, where they will once again put up the largest prop menu for that game of any property. Sorting through those options can be a major hassle, of course, but it gets easier this season – the SuperBook app will be released today, a nice addition to the options for Nevada local’s, and also the best way for someone coming to Las Vegas for that game to be able to get their action in (on Super Bowl Sunday, lines at the betting windows can often exceed an hour).
In the Sights…
The needle has not moved for Mississippi being without key inside cog Sebastian Saiz tonight, with #713 South Carolina (7:00 Eastern) remaining available at -1, and that means time to get into play. Even with Saiz available this was not a good matchup for Andy Kennedy’s team, which was already having to rely far too much on Stefan Moody and his 24.3 ppg. Saiz was the only other Rebel averaging in double figures at 12.8, but he was also averaging twice as many rebounds per game as any other player, while also contributing 20 steals. His numbers are impressive, and his absence will be magnified by the lack of both size and depth in the Ole Miss front-court. Even with Saiz the Rebels have been out-rebounded by 17 in their first five SEC games, and have allowed conference opponents to make an alarming 51.8 percent of their two-point attempts. Now it becomes a thin and fragile rotation.
South Carolina is well-built to take advantage. In P.J. Dozier and Sindarius Thornwell there are a pair of 6-5 guards that will make it difficult for the 5-10 Moody to find his shots, and their size and tenacity is part of why the Gamecocks are a +25 on the boards through their first four SEC games. What they are best at doing, guarding tenaciously and hitting the floor to get loose balls, plays into a weakness of the softer Rebels, and over the course of 40 minutes they should win enough of the ugly scramble plays to grab this scoreboard.
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