As the East Coast reeled in the aftermath of Breaking Bad's finale, the Patriots and Falcons played out one of the more entertaining games of the year on Sunday Night Football, eventually won 30-23 by the Patriots after no small amount of uncertainty. That game involved a number of key coaching decisions from Atlanta coach Mike Smith, a regular in the Thank You for Not Coaching section over the past couple of years for late-game decisions both good and bad. While I'll get to most of Smith's work in the full-length TYFNC on Tuesday, I want to talk today about the decisions he made on that penultimate drive, with the Falcons down 10 and with the ball deep in New England territory. He got it wrong in a way that I think many other coaches would have in the same scenario by kicking a field goal too early.
To set the stage, that play came on fourth-and-1 with three minutes left in the game and the ball on the New England 7-yard line. Smith's Falcons trailed by 10 points, so while the team would obviously prefer a touchdown, a field goal would also help matters by making it a one-score game and extending Atlanta's chances of competing. As most coaches would in the same situation, Smith chose to kick the chip shot field goal, bringing the Falcons within those seven points. The Falcons failed on the ensuing onside kick but then held the Patriots on downs when Tom Brady fumbled the snap on a fourth-and-1 sneak attempt. Atlanta quickly drove the ball downfield, only to fail on a fourth-and-7 from the 10-yard line with 41 seconds left. As this game turned out, I think it's pretty clear Smith made the wrong call, since the fourth-and-1 he passed on was much easier to convert than the fourth-and-7 he was stuck trying later. That's just one outcome, but I think it's a clear case before the Falcons even knew that they would have to convert a fourth down to score a touchdown on the second drive.
Go back to that fourth-and-1 decision and weigh the different arguments. Let's keep things simple and say the Falcons will lose if they fail to score on this drive, which seems reasonable enough. By kicking, the Falcons guarantee they won't lose with three minutes to go. Reasonable enough. On the other hand, by kicking, the Falcons are creating a more difficult path to victory in a number of ways:
• They lose if the Patriots score on their next drive. If the Falcons try an onside kick and fail to recover, as they did, the Patriots can try to run the clock out. If they get stuffed in field goal range, the Patriots can kick a field goal to go up 10 again and end the game. If the Falcons score a touchdown first, a Patriots field goal would put Atlanta down only six, giving it another opportunity to win the game with a touchdown drive.
• They have to regain the yardage needed for a touchdown on the subsequent drive that they've already produced on this one. If the Falcons score a touchdown on this drive and need only a field goal to tie on the subsequent drive, they don't need to drive the full length of the field to score. Instead, they only need to drive the ball to about the 25-yard line for a comfortable field goal try. Since the ball is already on the New England 7-yard line, that's a minimum of 19 extra yards the Falcons will need to pick up on the subsequent drive to score a touchdown (since they'll need those six final yards on both drives), yards that take precious time off the clock.
• The Falcons need to go for it on one of the two drives anyway, and a failure will be demoralizing regardless of when it comes. One of the common arguments against going for it early is that you end the game prematurely, which demoralizes your team by virtue of not extending the game for as long as possible and giving it a chance to win. It doesn't fit here. The Falcons can't tie this game by kicking field goals; their only hope is to score a touchdown on one drive and a minimum of a field goal on the other drive, which means they're going to need to score a touchdown at some point. Going for it on fourth-and-1 early, if anything, shows faith in your team. Had the Falcons gone for it then and failed, they would have been demoralized, of course. But do you think there was a single person in that home locker room after the game who wasn't demoralized? Was there anybody in that room who said, "Well, at least we kicked that field goal early, because it gave us a chance to tie the game up at the end?" Of course not.
