The Slimmest of Margins

When you actually sit down and think about it, the NFL playoffs are kind of ridiculous. In every other professional American sport, the playoffs are conducted as a series of games, either five or seven contests to pick out the better team. And more often than not, the better team is the one that advances, and the champion is usually the most deserving team in the field.

That isn’t the case in the NFL. In the NFL you only get one shot, and it only takes one game to end a team’s season. Looking at the playoff field now, with the top two seeds remaining on each side, it’s easy enough to proclaim them the four best teams in the league, that this was inevitable over the entire course of the season.

This ignores the reality of just how close each of the four games were on Sunday. In every one of the games, the final margin of victory was within a single score, and in every one of the games, the losing team had an opportunity to pull it out late, either with the ball in their hands or a chance to get it back. In all four games the two teams that played were extremely evenly matched, and in the end it came down to a few small factors to decide that New England, Arizona, Carolina, and Denver were the ones to advance while Kansas City, Green Bay, Seattle, and Pittsburgh were sent home for the season.

Luck

The first factor is one I’ve discussed often enough before, and one every losing fan ends up grumbling about at the end of the game. Sometimes (a lot of the time) a football game can come down to a few lucky or unlucky bounces. Fumble recoveries, deflected passes, onside kicks. There is so much randomness involved in a game that it often becomes difficult to extract who got lucky and who got screwed.

There may not be a game in the history of the league that exemplifies this better than the contest between Green Bay and Arizona. This game was sheer lunacy, from the very beginning and ramping up as it reached its conclusion. Plenty of Packers fans (and players) have complained about the outcome of overtime, in which Arizona won the coin toss and proceeded to score without giving the ball back to the Packers.

There are a couple of things I want to go into here. First was the coin toss. In a game as ridiculous as this, it actually doesn’t seem that absurd that something as simple as throwing a coin into the air would go awry. Somehow the referee managed to toss the coin up into the air without getting it to turn over even a single time (I just spent ten minutes trying to pull this off in my apartment, and it is actually pretty doable). The first toss came up in Arizona’s favor, and the Packers demanded it be redone, which the referee did without much hesitation. In this case I think the referee actually screwed up, since there’s no reason to believe the initial throw was in any way biased. Fortunately, the second toss came up for the Cardinals again, so no one could complain. Except for Aaron Rodgers, who protested that he wasn’t given a chance to pick another random outcome after the first random outcome failed to go his way.

And then there is the overtime rule. A lot of people were upset after the Cardinals scored, angry that the Packers didn’t have the opportunity to get the ball themselves. This happens every time a game goes like this, and I have a feeling we’ll eventually see the overtime rules tweaked again, either giving both teams a chance to possess the ball or going to the idiotic college system.

But as the system works right now, I don’t think it needs any changes. A couple years ago there was a problem, as kickers became so strong and so accurate that a team realistically only needed to reach the opponent’s 40 yardline to have a chance to win the game. They changed the rule, and now on the first possession a touchdown is required to end things, a system that should be perfectly acceptable. If a team is told that all they have to do is keep the opposing offense out of the endzone and their offense will come on the field with a chance to win the game, that should be a perfectly reasonable request. If they can’t do this, then they don’t deserve to win the game. And if it really is such a guarantee that the first team will score a touchdown, then we need to look at the rules that make it so easy for them to score, not the rules that reward them for doing so.

The Packers may complain about luck going against them in overtime, but they got plenty that went in their favor in regulation. The Hail Mary is the obvious example, but even before that they got a ten point swing after Rodgers’s brutal pick-six was erased by a penalty that had no effect on the play. And the Cardinals had their share of luck as well, with the dropped Carson Palmer interception on the goalline followed by miraculous deflection touchdown.

And that’s the truth about luck. Here or there it may swing a game, but the breaks we remember are always the breaks that go in the favor of the winning team, when in truth a football game has so much randomness that it usually balances out in the end.

Health

Football is a brutal game, and every team suffers injuries over the course of the season. But each year there are some that have it worse than others, and some that have to deal with injuries at the worst possible time. The Cincinnati Bengals are a perfect example of this, a team that was rolling steadily along until Andy Dalton went down with a broken thumb and left them with no choice but to start AJ McCarron in their playoff loss.

We saw a couple more examples of that in the first round of the playoffs. The Panthers-Seahawks contest was the only one of the weekend that wasn’t competitive from start to finish, thanks to an explosive first half from Carolina that allowed them to endure a second half surge from the Seahawks. Carolina’s offense definitely deserves credit for how they were able to ram the ball down the throat of Seattle’s defense, but a bigger factor was the utter domination of the Seahawks offense. The very first series set the tone for what we would see the rest of the half, as Carolina started by stuffing a run in the backfield followed by a pick-six that was caused by pressure in Russell Wilson’s face.

For the first half of the game, Carolina absolutely dominated Seattle’s offensive line. This is a unit that was bad from the start of the season, then had to deal with injuries, which only got worse when Russell Okung went down in the first half. At full strength this line might have been able to at least hold their ground, but as they were there was nothing they could do to stop Carolina from sprinting out to an insurmountable lead.

Green Bay was hurt by injuries as well, and like Seattle’s theirs were at one particular position. By the end of the game the best receiver they could put out on the field was James Jones, and they were stuck throwing to Jeff Janis down the stretch. (Random trivia: Janis had 101 yards receiving on the final drive alone, which isn’t actually an NFL record. That record belongs to Mike Evans, who had 104 yards receiving on a single drive in 2014.) It certainly didn’t help matters, but their passing offense wasn’t the reason they lost the game, and it’s unlikely that the presence of Randall Cobb or Davante Adams would have significantly swung the outcome. If both had been healthy and Jordy Nelson was still around, maybe things would have been different, but that was a ship that sailed a long time ago.

The one team that can truly point to injuries as the reason for their loss is Pittsburgh. Coming into the game everyone’s focus was on the previous weekend’s injuries to Antonio Brown and Ben Roethlisberger, and those certainly did have an impact on the game. Roethlisberger looked mostly fine despite playing with ligament damage in his shoulder, and even though their passing offense worked to surprising effectiveness against the Broncos defense, Brown is the sort of player who can’t be replaced. The Steelers moved the ball thanks to big plays to Martavis Bryant, Darrius Heyward-Bey, and Sammie Coates, but they didn’t have a reliable underneath threat to keep their offense running smoothly from the beginning to the end of the game.

When it comes to injuries we tend to turn our attention to whatever is most recent, and this is a case where we overlooked the biggest hole on Pittsburgh’s offense. Fitzgerald Toussaint and Jordan Todman performed effectively enough against Cincinnati, but it was inevitable that the absence of Pittsburgh’s top two running backs would come back to bite them. And it certainly did, with a game changing fumble by Toussaint as Pittsburgh was driving at the edge of field goal range with the lead in the fourth quarter. This is the sort of play that likely wouldn’t have happened with DeAngelo Williams in the game, and certainly wouldn’t have happened with Le’Veon Bell. Through three seasons in the league Bell has fumbled exactly one time, and his reliability as a ball handler is just another part of what makes him the best back in the league.

A season ruined by injuries sucks, but the Steelers have to be optimistic going into next year. If they can keep their offense healthy—including the return of Maurkice Pouncey and Kelvin Beachum on the offensive line—this could be a historically great group. Against Denver they showed that they have the best and deepest group of receivers in the league, to go along with a quarterback who just makes plays no matter what is happening around them. Their defense looked strong as well, and if they can make some improvements to the secondary, this team has a very reasonable case to make as the Super Bowl favorites going into 2016.

Coaching

So far I’ve talked about luck and injuries, two factors outside a team’s control. But now I get to something that is entirely within a team’s control, yet something that can be just as enigmatic. Coaching is the great immeasurable of the NFL, but it should surprise no one that arguably the three best coaches in the league are among the four left alive. (Gary Kubiak is an exception, but you could make an argument that Peyton Manning is a great enough football mind to lift a mediocre coach.)

This past weekend, we saw excellent examples of just what a difference coaching could make. The most obvious was in the one game I haven’t touched on yet, the contest between Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots and Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs. Late in the game down by two touchdowns, the Chiefs showed a stunning lack of urgency in getting the first score they needed, letting the clock run down to the two minute warning then actually huddling up with time running after that. The odds were always long against them, but their use of the clock stripped them of whatever hope they had, letting New England’s defense off the hook and pushing them to the next round.

Reid has been an NFL coach for a very long time, and at this point everyone knows about his shortcomings in clock management. But Saturday’s defeat was astounding even for him, and he needs to spend this offseason seriously reconsidering how he manages games. Because Reid is a very, very good coach, as evidenced by the consistent success he’s had at both of his stops, and this one major flaw may be the only thing holding him back from competing for a championship. The Chiefs are probably still a step below New England on a talent level, but Reid’s coaching kept them in the game, until his coaching knocked them out of it.

The one game in which the better coach lost was the Pittsburgh-Denver contest, and in a lot of ways it swung on a poor decision by Mike Tomlin. Tomlin has done an underrated job this season, leading his team to the playoff despite all the injuries I mentioned above plus four regular season games without Roethlisberger. He was the only coach in the league to truly embrace going for two, and his aggression in playing for a touchdown on the final play against San Diego got Pittsburgh a win that proved crucial to making the postseason.

And yet, he still has occasional lapses in decision making that are as baffling as they are misguided. In the cases I mentioned above he showed aggression that helped push his team over the top, but he also has a conservative streak that holds the Steelers back. We saw this in Sunday’s game, when he elected to punt the ball from the 34 yardline rather than trying a long field goal.

Tomlin has always been strangely reluctant to trust his kickers on long field goals, and even though Chris Boswell has been playing extremely well, he didn’t get the chance for a makeable kick. 52 yards is definitely within his range (I personally saw him put a 60 yarder off the crossbar in a game between Northwestern and Rice in 2011), and he was absolutely booming the ball in the high altitude of Denver.

It’s impossible to say exactly what would have happened the rest of the game, but if he had made the kick it would have extended the Steelers lead to four points. When the Broncos scored later, they would have kicked the extra point rather than going for two, and the Steelers would have gotten the ball back needing a field goal to tie rather than a touchdown. And even if they had failed on the ensuing drive like they did in reality, a Broncos field goal would have kept it to a one score game, giving Pittsburgh the ball back with an opportunity to win it with a touchdown.

Lapses like these are difficult to defend, not like the grayer circumstances we saw in the two NFC games. There’s been some talk about whether Green Bay should have gone for two after completing their Hail Mary pass, and while some very strong cases have been made, I am still rather ambivalent on the subject. I don’t think the percentages are strongly weighted in one direction or the other, and I wouldn’t have had any problem with either decision McCarthy made.

Instead I want to talk about a decision made by Bruce Arians on the play before, the completed Hail Mary that allowed the Packers to be in that situation. I’ve looked into Hail Mary passes a bit in the past, and I have some very strong opinions about how they should be defended. I despise teams that send only a three man rush, and I was excited as anyone when I saw the Cardinals lining up to bring seven rushers. This is a strategy that should be able to work, getting to the quarterback before the receivers have a chance to make it to the endzone.

It failed in this situation because Rodgers managed to escape the pocket. If they had kept him contained, there is no way he could have completed the pass, and at first I blamed poor design for sending such a lopsided blitz. With seven players rushing, they could easily have spared two to keep contain. As someone who despises the Packers, I was furious with the Cardinals coaches, until I saw a replay of the play in question. It turns out that they did have someone in contain, one of their best players Calais Campbell. He came up the field and bent inwards, keeping his outside arm free in textbook technique. And it would have worked too, if it wasn’t for one of the most egregious holds I have ever seen by David Bakhtiari.

Again, it comes back to luck. Sometimes the ref throws the flag, sometimes he doesn’t. It worked out for Arizona in the end thanks to some more aggressive coaching, and I hope in the future they don’t let this one failure stop them from using similar tactics in the future.

Another difficult and controversial decision occurred in the Seahawks-Panthers game. Late in the first half, Pete Carroll elected to send his offense out for a fourth and 5 rather than attempting a field goal. They failed and went into halftime down 31-0, in a decision that seemed meaningless at the time. It didn’t seem quite so meaningless late in the fourth quarter, when the Seahawks were down ten and a field goal would have made things a one score game.

This is a case of hindsight ignoring some very important details. Seattle was down 31 points at the time of the decision, and Carroll knew that he had to be aggressive if he had any hope of getting back into the game. This same aggression that failed him in the first half proved to be vital in the second half, as the Seahawks launched deep shot after deep shot to claw their way back into the game. That’s the thing about aggressive coaching decisions. Sometimes they don’t work out, and the coach has to face the blame for the consequences. But in the long run they average out to help a team more than they hurt it, and that’s why three of the most aggressive head coaches in the league are still alive right now.