As we prepare for a new FBS college football season, it’s worth looking at coaching once again, this time in the form of game management.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the 2014 FBS season was that on multiple occasions — not just once — two highly-credentialed head coaches committed grade-school coaching errors… and one of them defended his move days after a Saturday defeat.
*
Chris Petersen might have been given a great situation by Dan Hawkins at Boise State, but he certainly took the Broncos to the next level, winning two Fiesta Bowls and producing seasons in 2010 and 2011 which certainly deserved BCS bowl berths (but did not lead to them). Had the New Year’s Six format existed in conjunction with the current structure of the realigned conferences in 2010 and 2011, Petersen would have made four BCS/NY6 bowls at Boise State. Moreover, the few games he lost at the program were generally:
1) absurdly crazy (or crazily absurd);
and/or
2) caused by the inability of his kicker(s) to perform under pressure.
Petersen couldn’t get his kickers to kick well, but he taught every other component of football as well as one could ever hope for. His Boise State teams wobbled in a few seasons (2007, 2012, and especially 2013), but they generally punched opponents in the mouth while demonstrating acute precision on offense. The Broncos weren’t just imposing at their best; they were clinical as well. Their propensity to be in the right place at the right time — winning with seasoned yet not eye-popping talent — evoked Bill Snyder and the Kansas State program, only on a smaller scale. (One of the many regrets created by the BCS era? We never got to see Kansas State play Boise State in a BCS bowl. That SHOULD have been the 2012 Sugar Bowl matchup; instead, Virginia Tech played Michigan.)
Petersen has been an excellent coach. He has his hands full in Seattle with the Washington Huskies, but his body of work over nearly a decade speaks for itself.
Brian Kelly has forged a signature achievement at every head coaching stop he’s made. He won two NCAA Division II national championships at Grand Valley State. He won a Mid-American Conference championship at Central Michigan. He made two BCS bowls at Cincinnati, and if a Colt McCoy pass had not hit a railing at Texas Stadium — instead flying through the air for one more second before it hit the ground — the Bearcats would have played Alabama for the 2009 FBS national championship. Kelly, not any of Lou Holtz’s other successors in South Bend, guided Notre Dame to a BCS National Championship Game appearance in the 2012 season.
Kelly, you can see, wins everywhere he goes. Like Petersen, he has known what he’s doing for a very long time.
However, as great as professionals can be in their line of work, all of us have our strengths and weaknesses. More precisely, our weaknesses can often be tied to our blind spots, those parts of our work in which we fall into certain traps or (for whatever reason) just aren’t as airtight in weeding out imperfections as we are in other areas. It’s part of being human. Whether it’s a left-right brain orientation issue, or something which formed deep in our psyches when we were young — perhaps when we gained a certain idea or inclination from our parents — there are certain things most of us simply don’t do as well as others. When life and work intersect in such a way that we have to display a skill we’re not very good at displaying, our performance — generally very strong — can suffer.
This is as good an explanation for Chris Petersen’s and Brian Kelly’s spectacular 2014 mistakes as I can offer. If you can give a better one, you should be making a pile of money as a college football writer.
*
What appalling and jawdropping mistake did these two generally excellent football coaches make last season? It’s appalling and jawdropping precisely because it relates to one of the simplest parts of coaching. More precisely, in what is very much a profession whose practitioners want to be as risk-averse as possible, Petersen and Kelly followed the path of completely unnecessary risk to their great detriment.
This play needs no introduction or explanation:
Since that point in time, coaches learned to kneel on the ball in order to drain the final two minutes of the clock. Taking a knee became the risk-averse way to finish a game with a one-score lead. What could be simpler or safer for a coach? Nothing.
Yet, someway and somehow, Petersen and Kelly ignored this supremely basic dimension of endgame management in 2014.
When you look at these clips — the Washington-Arizona clip starts at 7:40, the Notre Dame-Northwestern clip is at the beginning of the video — notice the time and timeouts:
In each case, there was about 1:35 left on the clock. In Washington-Arizona, the trailing team (Arizona) had one timeout left, but on first down for Washington. In Notre Dame-Northwestern, the down was second down, but the trailing team (Northwestern) did not have any timeouts left. In both situations, two kneel-downs — assuming that the quarterback will wait a few seconds to kneel the ball — would have brought the game clock under 10 seconds. The 1:35 mark represents 95 seconds. Two 40-second-clock runoffs equal 80 seconds. Play durations of roughly four seconds apiece would translate into another eight seconds off the clock. That’s 88 of 95 or 96 seconds, with a greatly diminished risk of a fumble from “victory formation.”
Moreover, both teams were in or near the middle third of the field. Being pinned toward one’s own end zone and allowing a blocked punt for a safety were not genuine concerns. Moreover, not being pinned near one’s own end zone gave the punters on each team the ability to run around and waste time in the event of a bad snap or a busted blocking assignment.
Really — all Washington and Notre Dame had to do was kneel twice, and then kick a quick 25-yard punt out of bounds. At the absolute worst, Arizona and Northwestern would have gained the ball in their own thirds of the field with two or three seconds left, good enough for only one play without the chance to ever set up a field goal.
Nope and nope. Petersen and Kelly, two men who have forgotten more about football than you or I will ever learn in life, couldn’t get this one right. Moreover, Petersen insistently defended his decision days later.
Give a coach a risk-free path to an optimal outcome, and he’s usually the first one to take it. Chris Petersen and Brian Kelly are innovative and clever when they need to be, but endgame management situations sometimes require simplicity.
Let’s see if coaches paid attention to “The Joe Pisarcik Rule” in the offseason.
