Why Can't Our Coaching Staff Figure This Stuff Out?

[RiverDog]

Yesterday we had the ball deep in our own territory, 4th down, 5 minutes left in the game with an 8 point lead and the game clock running. Dickson punts the ball with a good 15 seconds left on the play clock (haven't seen the replay yet to tell exactly how much time was left).

And that's not the first time we've missed opportunities due to a lack of situational awareness. Recently (Cards game I think) on 4th and 1 from about the 35 yard line, we line up to kick a field goal then just let the play clock run out, take a 5 yard delay of game penalty, then punt. If we were going to punt, why in the hell didn't we leave our offense on the field and try to pull the defense offside then take the delay of game?

Then we have this almost identical situation from the Patriots-Titans game on Saturday:

The Titans held a 14-13 lead and were facing fourth and 4 from the Patriots' 36-yard line with 6:39 left to play. While some teams might opt to go for it so deep in enemy territory, Vrabel brought out the punt team and decided to play for field position instead.

But rather than merely snapping and punting the ball, Vrabel and the Titans took a delay-of-game penalty, draining the clock as far as they could while moving their punt attempt back 5 yards. When the ball was reset, the clock began to tick again.

Again, the Titans looked set to punt, but Wesley Woodyard took an intentional false start just before the play clock expired, moving the team back 5 more yards but keeping the clock running.

From there, more chaos ensued, with the Patriots being drawn into a neutral-zone infraction before the Titans finally kicked the ball with 4:44 remaining in the game.

https://www.businessinsider.com/titans- ... rbfFTtzwdQ

This failure to pay attention to detail really burns my arse. It's one of Pete's biggest weaknesses.

[Oly]

This failure to pay attention to detail really burns my arse. It's one of Pete's biggest weaknesses.

It's his biggest, IMO, just because it should be SO easy to fix.

[I-5]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there someone on every team's sideline or upstairs box whose sole job is to expertly understand clock management and know every possible optimum scenario? I don't think the head coach should necessarily be the only person to maintain this info, even if it's part of their job. Thoughts?

[Oly]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there someone on every team's sideline or upstairs box whose sole job is to expertly understand clock management and know every possible optimum scenario? I don't think the head coach should necessarily be the only person to maintain this info, even if it's part of their job. Thoughts?

My thought would be that Pete would be in charge of hiring and firing that person, and so the buck still stops with Pete. All it does is make me angry at two people instead of one.

[Aseahawkfan]

Is anyone perfect on these decisions besides maybe Belichick? I have nothing to compare the idea of clock management to. Any stats indicating we do a worse job than other teams?

I put this more on the offensive coordinator. OCs are the ones that drill the offense. We may not have an OC that spends much time drilling the idea of clock management on offense. If we had Holmgren, he would likely pay attention more to the nuances of tight clock management.

We've been in the playoffs every year but one under Pete. That's better than 80 or 90% of coaches in the NFL. I have no idea how much of an effect these small clock blunders have on a game or how to compare them to other coaches to rate the effect on our win-loss percentage.

[NorthHawk]

Every team has a few weak spots and this is one of ours.
I thought I read in passing that Sean Payton messed up the time management this weekend, too.
But it does seem to happen on a far too regular basis with the Seahawks however, like ASF alluded to,
it might be that we aren't that much of an exception - or maybe we are, I don't know.

[mykc14]

Every team has a few weak spots and this is one of ours.
I thought I read in passing that Sean Payton messed up the time management this weekend, too.
But it does seem to happen on a far too regular basis with the Seahawks however, like ASF alluded to,
it might be that we aren't that much of an exception - or maybe we are, I don't know.

I think that is the issue here, the frequency. It just seems to happen too much. Every coach at some point, probably multiple points is going to look back and think they should have handled the clock a bit differently on this play, but it just seems to happen to us so much. I think the other frustration is that it should be an easy fix. Overall I love PC. He has been a great hire for this team and certainly will go down as the greatest coach to ever walk the sidelines of our Hawks as well as wear a Gold Jacket one day. There are aspects of his coaching that I greatly disagree with though- offensive philosophy and time management issues are on the top of that list. He is never going to change his offensive philosophy so I just deal with it, but it seems like he could easily fix the time management piece.

[RiverDog]

Somebody mentioned that the Jets hire someone to specifically monitor game management opportunities.

Obviously the buck stops with the head coach, but some of this stuff is so elementary that the players themselves should be cognizant of it. For example, the deep snapper on the punt team shouldn't even bend over to snap the ball until there's about 5 or 6 seconds left on the play clock. Every player should know the basic objective in a given situation, like staying in bounds when we're trying to run out the clock. It's things like this that they should be talking about in team meetings.

I realize that Pete's not the only coach to have this problem. Holmgren used to have his nose buried so deep into that Denny's menu of his that he quite often lost track of the game situation. But then I take a look at some rookie coach like Mike Vrabel and how he milked nearly 2 minutes off a game clock protecting a smaller lead with more time left than we were and it gets me riled up.