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Personally I thought Vrabel was stupid for not going for it on 4th and 3. Any other year you give Brady that much time to beat you with a field goal he would have been successful 99% of the time. In previous years playing not to lose played right into BB and Brady's hands.
Getting away from the run first & foremost.
To that effect, trying the 59 yard FG May have also been a better option.
In previous years, yes, 100% true. But in last night's game with NE's offense struggling, betting on them not being able to drive the length of the field for a FG was a good bet.
I don't think it was a good call at all, they got lucky. Giving Brady and BB 5 minutes for a FG is stupid in most cases. As for a field goal, that shouldn't have been a thought in Vrabel's head and wasn't.
In the playoffs you play to win and I wouldn't want to give any NFL team 5 minutes to get a field goal to beat me. 4th and 3 in NE territory was a no brainer to me to go for it.
If they go for it & fail they’re giving Brady a short field.
I guess we both understand where each other stands, so there isn't anything more to say about it.
No it was worse than that. Edelman was in some kind of middle area in no man's land. He wasn't up trying to block the punt. He wasn't back to receive it. He was kind of half way in between, I guess to cover the gunner (who was uncovered due to the all out block attempt by the other 10 guys) on a potential fake. It made no sense, either have him back to catch the ball or on the line to block it. He was essentially a wasted player just standing half way in between. Horrible special teams decision there by the Pats.
I thought they should have gone for it but this isn't really a fair way to look at it. You can't just give the Pats credit for gaining 30 yards on those 2 plays while ignoring that outcome if they'd started from the failed 4th down field position.
They didn't pin the Pats on the 1 on that punt. That was a different punt at the end of the game.
I was super confused by that at the time. Saw Edelman out there & thought he was going to be used as a returner - then he came up to the line. That was....weird.
Ah - yes, that’s correct. My bad.
But that's the thing, Edelman wasn't on the line. Nor was he back for a return. He was lined up like 15 yards off the LoS where he couldn't help with either the block nor field the return.
I see it more as an illustration of how teams tend to overrate the value of field position relative to possession, especially with today’s high powered offenses.
Yeah - I noticed that as well. He ran up to the line, then floated back to no man’s land.
But time is also a factor. In end-game strategy you’re putting them deep in their own territory without a lot of time on the clock.
They were playing to win. Vrabel bet on his great punter pinning the Pats deep in their end. He bet on his very good defense shutting down a weak offense. It was 4th and 4 (not 4th and 3) which is a passing situation. There is a decent chance they don’t convert which would give the Pats 25-30 yards closer to FG range. I would have been ok with the decision to go for it but punting given the game script was not a bad decision at all.
Exactly this. The fact that they punted and pinned the Pats back is the reason why Belichick made the decision to not go for it on 4th down.
Yeah, I wondered about the runoff as well. The one thing I was thinking was maybe they wanted to preserve the option of throwing to the middle of the field. Still, I feel like they could have done more with that 10 seconds, especially with the best WR in football.
The dumbest clock management I've seen since the Saints in the NFC championship game last year.
I dunno, I think he's got a pretty good shot at the SB this year. They're currently the SB faves in Vegas as of this minute.
I was kind of thinking about this when LSU punted in the national championship game on 4th and 4 from their own 48 (at a time in the game where Clemson's offense was still moving the ball well, no less).
I think most coaches don't care about fan criticism, unelss they face it directly. And some of these guys are legends in their own minds, even if they are deeply flawed coaches. See BoB on both counts.
Really? That seems incredibly low to me. I feel like if we tried to actually carry it out physically with what we might agree as a fair coin, even if the flip were done by a machine, that it might take a lifetime before we would ever see tails 9 times in a row (or heads). I'm not saying you're wrong. I agree with the argument you made here. But I was expecting to hear that the odds of hitting 9 in a row were so astronomical that the likelihood of the coin (or flip mechanism) *not* being fair actually become quite plausible.
Drink plenty of water before you go to sleep tonight. It will help with tomorrow's hangover.
It’s actually a straightforward calculation. Each flip has a 50% chance (1 in 2) of being tails, so to get 2 tails requires 50% of 50% (1in 4), and three requires 50% of 1 in 4, which would be 1 in 8. Keep multiplying by two: 8, 16, 32, etc. You get 512 for the 9th tail.
Like I said I'm not saying you're wrong I just really thought it would be a *much* bigger number.
One of the ways you can detect whether a sequence of supposedly random numbers was actually chosen by humans is that human intuition about sequences is wrong. We under-estimate how common streaks are in random numbers.
