I don’t know of any Ravens, Pats, or Falcons fans around here, so we can all agree on “Go Niners!”, right?
Observations:
- The Seahawks need to do something about that slow start. They can’t always make up for it in the second half.
- Clock management doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult, but at the end, both teams left too much time for the other.
- As a 49er fan, I’m relieved Even if the next game is now away instead of home.
- Terry Bradshaw’s brow ridges make him look about 50% Neanderthal.
- The only way to get to Brady is to keep his receivers covered. If he has an outlet, he’ll find it.
- The Texans’ offense is boring. Way too many runs up the middle, even after it’s clear the other team is ready for that.
- All the remaining teams have been to a Super Bowl. Only the Falcons haven’t won one.
Yeah Go 9ers. I can’t see Flaco dong well in NE. I’d just as soon see NE and the ratbirds both fall into a giant sink hole then either get to the SB, but oh well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the falcons lose big and hard. If both harbaughs get to the SB the collective mass of ego could create a supermassive black hole of scowl.
The decision not to kick field goals in the first half, for which Pete Carroll is taking all kinds of flack (and I don’t necessarily disagree that he should be taking it) surely has everything to do with the point you raise. I strongly suspect Carroll was almost desperate to get in the end zone and cut off the slow start skid they were on. With that problem to work against, the risk of going into the locker room down 20-0 might* even have been worth taking for the chance at the relative morale boost of being down 20-7 on a touchdown compared to down 20-*6* on two field goals. (Indeed, on simple outcome analysis it might have been – the numbers will surely be run over the course of the week.)
I imagine the halftime morale issues facing Carroll and his team in the various scenarios looking something like the following. It’s going to be hard to convince the team that the offense was actually looking pretty zippy when you’ve only scored two field goals (even though it did look pretty zippy!). Moreover, you then have to address the persistent Red Zone difficulties that you’ve faced in first halves all year. ‘Well men, we (as always) need to do better in the Red Zone.’ And the stare you get back says, ‘Well, yes, coach. We’re trying. Any new ideas since halftime last week?’ Not uplifting.
On the other hand, if you score a TD (just one!), not only are you a point better off (assuming successful PAT), you can point to a first-half success in the Red Zone and argue, plausibly based on the track record, that you’re in a fine position. Keep doing what you’re doing! And if you’re down 20-0 you obviously say, ‘Well, we all know what we need now: a completely historic comeback. So dig deep and see if you’ve got yet another one down there somewhere. Oh by the way, this one has to be bigger than any of the others ones you’ve notched.’ Of course, that comeback turned out to be in them. Or, almost. Point is, I can see making the calls to go for it just based on the what pattern of slow starts does to moral, even if the statistics say to try for the 3 – and it’s not clear they would.
All that being said, the way you win is by scoring points, not giving maximally motivating speeches to losing locker rooms. So I’m not arguing that those who say they should have, like, scored the points are wrong. It’s hard to argue with that. But I have a feeling that if I were a football coach, I’d be criticized more often for going for it on fourth down when I shouldn’t than for not when I (maybe) should.
*I use “might” very advisedly here: statistically, it might well be the wrong call not to try for those FGs. But it also might be the right call to keep trying for the TDs. My sense is that it’s a narrow case one way or the other The probabilities generally militate in favor of going for it on fourth down far more often than NFL coaches in fact tend to do. I’m just not sure what they’d say about these particular particulars – yet. I’m sure we’ll hear much more about that over the course of the week. The point, though, is that the moral particulars may have swung a narrow case for kicking to a narrow one for going. But either way, for those of us who would like to see coaches embrace more what these numbers suggest, this instance of a coach – and if I could have any coach for my Packers in the League right now it’d be Carroll in two seconds flat – possibly combining a leaning-forward awareness of the strategic imperatives given by analysis of thousands of game outcomes AND the kind of gut-level awareness of his team’s moment-to-moment psychological needs – is heartening. I wish I felt as good about the Packers’ medium-term prospects as I do about my second-favorite NFL squad – the Seattle Seahawks (and I really don’t care about Fail Mary any more – it wouldn’t have mattered whether the Packers had to play the 9ers in SF or GB, they couldn’t beat that team on the moon if they had jet packs and the 9ers didn’t.). What a surprisingly great season for the Squawks.
/football opus
moral particulars?
morale particulars, that is.
I think people are wrongly putting the blame on Carroll for the end-of-half series. Had Wilson gotten rid of the ball like he should have, they kick an easy FG. Wilson took a bad sack and, being that it was 4th down, they couldn’t spike the ball or run the FG unit on. Rookies are going to make that mistake and MAYBE Carroll should have called an entire different series of plays (I’m not even sure if he calls the offensive plays) to avoid being in that scenario, but it’s really hard to peg that on him the same way the 4th down call was (which I agree with in theory, though the particular play call was bad).
Watch the play again. Russell Wilson senses/avoids pressure in the pocket as well as any quarterback in the League right now. From the last moment the defender looks well-blocked to the moment Wilson’s been thrown to the turf is barely enough time for a human reflex reaction, let alone enough time to evade or dump the ball. There was no chance to avoid the sack on that play. It was just an extraordinary play by the Atlanta pass rusher.
Michael,
I’ll confess to having only seen the play once in real time, but if memory serves, it did look like Wilson actually had a chance to throw the ball away while he was getting wrestled down. It was definitely one of those, “You can’t take a sack in that situation,” type plays. Which still sometimes result in sacks because defenders do make fantastic plays. Perhaps I was too hard on Wilson there but IF there is any criticism of Seattle missing points at the end of the half, it should be aimed towards Wilson and certainly not at Carroll, though it might simply be the case that there really isn’t any blame to be offered.
I don’t agree. If you decide that FGs were important to get in those situations, there were ample ways for Carroll to assure that reasonable attempts were taken, and that’s his job. He was clearly focussed on getting in the end zone. It can’t rest on Russell Wilson to have to make an extraordinary play to avoid a sack on a play where he was instructed to try to get the ball to a receiver in the end zone. That’s the risk you take. If he gratuitously took the sack when getting rid of the ball would have been easy, okay, but from the time when the play was still alive with time to kill the clock to when he was on the ground was uncommonly short. The pocket just collapsed. Watch it again.
…Perhaps you can say that Wilson should have preemptively rolled out so he could throw it away with no penalty. I’m not sure how much time that kills, though.
I think going for the end zone was the right call: The vast majority of the time you either get a TD or the FG. The times you don’t are the result of either a turnover, running a play short of the end zone that doesn’t get out-of-bounds, or a sack. In this case, the latter happened. Unable to rewatch the play, I’m happy to concede that the Atlanta defender made a fantastic play that Wilson was unable to avoid. My broader point was that heaping on Carroll for *that* sequence seemed entirely kneejerk. He made the right call, but nothing is guaranteed. C’est la vie.
Gotcha. Generally, of course, “You can’t take a sack there” applies to that situation in force. But then there’s the exigencies of the field of play. Anyone (and, since last night when Carroll was taking a lot of heat, the tide of sentiment seems to have turned to what you are/werr saying, so I don’t mean to ignore your concession, only continue to address the general point…) who says Wilson is on the hook for that sack should look at the play closely before maintaining that position. If they still think it’s on him after watching it, well then our eyes just disagree about what happened.
Sometimes you just have to tip your hat to the D. Seems like this is an appropriate time.
I still do. A correct call would have changed the dynamics of not just that game — I agree SF’s offensive line was simply bigger and stronger than GB’s defensive line and that would have given Kaepernick the time he needs to shine.
But it would have changed the dynamics of a series of other games, too. In particular, as observed elsewhere in this thread Atlanta does not respond well under actual pressure (warning: choking hazard). So it’s possible that had the Fail Mary been called right, Saturday’s game could have been SF at ATL, or ATL at SF, or maybe even the SeaChickens at SF.
Under any of these scenarios, having seen what I’ve seen, we wind up with San Francisco representing the NFC in this year’s Super Bowl. Damnit. (“Damnit” because it wasn’t going to be the Packers — if it can’t be the Packers, I kind of like the 49ers in that role as opposed to pretty much any other team in the conference.) But with a good call in the Fail Mary, we could have been looking at a different road there, with SF not beating Green Bay until the championship game instead of a divisional.
Golden Tate did not catch that ball. M.D. Jennings did.
Seattle crushed SF at Seattle late in the season. It’s not clear what would have happened in a Seattle at SF game, or even a Seattle at GB game. But I take your point. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, it’s just that it was a long time ago, and bad calls are part of sports. I’m just not feeling the call so much anymore. Green Bay was (probably, almost definitely) not good enough to go to the Super Bowl this year. Given how highly this team has allowed itself to think of itself and be talked about (i.e. as a presumptively dominant offensive force) while somehow letting dominance slip away over the last year, I don’t really feel the loss of one playoff game too highly. With all the talk about how great the team supposedly is or should be, I think we fans really should have a anything-short-of-the-Super-Bowl-is-problematic attitude. I almost(!) prefer this early wake-up call, so that team management is forced to face where the team actually stacks up in the conference, leave aside the League. Though by all means I wish they’d gotten the call right too.
True, ’tis better to have made the playoffs than not made the playoffs, even if we are now out of them. And the display of faults can be a help — if said faults are subsequently remedied.
But still, Golden Tate did not catch that ball. M.D. Jennings did.
By all means.
I think Justin Smith’s injury is the biggest factor in the uneven play of the 49er D. He was present (and judging by his play, healthy enough) for both Packer games, resulting in sub-par games for the Green Bay O. He was present for the dominating first half against the Pats, but absent for the 28-points-in-less-than-10-minutes explosion that took away the lead. And he was missing for the drubbing at Seattle. Sure, I’d rather play the Falcons, but with both Smiths healthy, I don’t fear either bird of prey at the Stick.
That’s fair. It’s a theory, but it’s fair. I maintain it’s not clear what happens in Sea@SF if the Seattle D stops either of the two passes that set up the Bryant FG.
…Perhaps it should be clear to me. But I don’t think Seattle’s D looks as flummoxed by Kaepernick as GB’s, especially having that film to watch.
Nor will Atlanta’s . Whomever else the 49ers face in the remainder of the postseason will have worked on containing Kaepernick.
Yes. Although, it’s not like he just took over three weeks ago. Capers & GB had plenty of time to work on the necessary concepts. (Their problem in that game was twofold: their 1) inferior athletes 2) had no idea where to look for the ball or whose assignment it was to cover it in various situations.)
The point about Seattle is that, unlike the Packers or Falcons, just less than a month ago they actually played this SF team with a Kaepernick who’d by then had a few good games on which to build confidence and fluency running the offense, and bottled him up fairly successfully. Yes, at Seattle, and yes with Chris Clemons but that’s just factors. And Justin Smith is another factor, but the magnitude of the December victory is a fact. There’s no guarantee they would win again. But my claim isn’t that they’d be a favorite much less a strong one; it’s merely that the game’s outcome beforehand would have best been described as highly uncertain. Lots of countervailing factors, but those have to start with a recent dominant Seattle victory with the teams in more or less their final compositions, plus or minus a few injuries. Whatever other factors there would have been to consider, I don’t think that recent result can be discounted to the extent that we could say the outcome of that game would have looked more certain than uncertain today. I’d certainly concede that a Seattle victory scenario would have been as likely to involve a comeback by them as not, though.
But of course that’s all shouting into the wind at this point.
For us Seahawks, that was practically winning the Superbowl. Great year, boys.
Back in ’93, when the Giants won 103 games (but didn’t get to the playoffs, because the fishing Braves won 104 and this was before the wildcard), I told everybody that that was the best Giants team I’d ever seen, how proud I was of their play and how hard they fought, how amazing it was that the race went to the very last game, and that, all in all, it was the best season I’d ever been part of.
I was so full of it my eyeballs were brown.
Mr. Kelly, you have been served.
At the end of the ‘Hawks/Falcons game, it seemed as if both coaches were doing their damnedest to lose. How did Seattle’s league-leading defense let the Falcons get into field-goal range in two plays? Why did Carroll try to ice the kicker and do so in such a way as to give him a practice kick, which every kick insists they prefer 10 times out 10? How did Mike Smith leave time on the clock? Why did the Falcons kick it directly at the Seahawks player standing on the 50? If he recovers that cleanly and goes down, they have time to get into field goal range. That was a garish display of coaching and supports Bill Simmons’ theory that every team should have a 14-year-old Madden expert helping them with such strategic planning.
Overall, though, that was a hell of a weekend for football. The team I preferred to win lost every game, but I think we’ve got a great matchup in the AFC (only slightly behind the best matchup, which would have been Pats/Broncos) and a good-but-not-great matchup in the NFC (Niners/Hawks, Packers/Hawks both would have been better).
I remain unimpressed with Atlanta despite some obviously talented players on the team. When I stepped out back at halftime to run some errands, the Falcons’ boots were squarely on Russell Wilson’s neck. I get back about halfway through the fourth quarter and I’m all “whaaaaaaa!” It took Pete Carroll performing the Heimlich on them in the most overt sort of way before they woke up and stopped choking at the end there.
Cannonarm boy needs to very quickly learn to take just a smidge off some of those throws or he’s going to give up the ball 4 times in a game real soon. I haven’t seen anybody throw that hard from the line of scrimmage to 15 yards down the field since Elway was early in his career and he made that mistake all the time.
If the Smiths play that well on defense next go-around, Atlanta won’t cover.
Time to believe, Mike. Time to believe.
As long as I don’t have to be washed in the blood of the lamb, we’re good.
Here is a link to a grizzly story about what Jason Taylor, former Dolfish’s star LB, had to go through to play. Just insane and crazy and crazy/insane the pain and things he did to play. Not for the squeamish but should be required reading for football fans.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/13/v-fullstory/3179926/dan-le-batard-jason-taylors-pain.html#storylink=cpy