Championship Round Recap

Well, that was an interesting Sunday. After a couple fairly mediocre playoff weekends, we had a real show in the Championship Round, the first time in NFL history that two playoff games went into overtime on the same day. And even though both were resolved fairly quickly in overtime, there was still plenty of heartpounding drama before it was decided that the Rams will play the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

I’ll have more to say about these two teams next week, but before that happens I want to run through what happened on Sunday, starting unfortunately with where all conversations about the day have to start.

The Referees

I wish I could just ignore this. I wish I could just say that a bunch of bad calls even out over the course of a game, then move on to discuss the actual football action. I’m pretty sure everyone wishes this (except perhaps the losing fans, who want a clear scapegoat to target). But the officiating was the major story of Sunday’s games, most notably their failure to call pass interference on the Rams in a situation that likely would have given the Saints the victory.

There are a lot of borderline calls over the course of an NFL game. This wasn’t one of them. The defender clearly arrived before the ball did, and he clearly made no attempt to do anything other than knock the receiver to the ground. He has admitted it, the league has admitted it, and even the most delusional Rams fan needs to accept that this was a penalty, it should have been called, and the Saints should have had the opportunity to run the clock down under thirty seconds before kicking the field goal to take the lead.

The Saints and their fans are justifiably outraged today, and everyone else is looking around for ways to fix this. I’m certain there will be consequences for the referees involved, and possibly even a change at the head of the officiating office. The league will meet this offseason to discuss rule changes, and I expect they will come out with something to try to prevent this specific scenario from happening in the future.

The problem is that this specific scenario won’t happen in the future, and any rule they create will have much greater ripple effects than I would care to have happen. The most common suggestion is to allow penalties to be reviewed, an idea that has been floating around for quite some time. A review would have allowed the referees to check the tape and clearly see that the call was missed, giving the Saints the first down they deserved.

But what if things had been a bit more marginal? What if the Rams defender had gotten his head around and merely bumped into the receiver while trying to play the ball? Very few pass interference penalties are as clear cut as this one, and the moment we allow a review to be held, we are opening ourselves up to questioning every single play that happens in a game. Two players are handfighting down the sideline? Normally that doesn’t get flagged, but in slow motion you can see a few moments where the receiver’s path to the ball is impeded. Even as frequently as we see penalties called in the secondary, by the letter of the law there could be even more, and allowing every play to be reexamined in slow motion will further impact the flow of the game.

And do we even stop at pass interference? Do we allow a touchdown to be called back if on review we see that the receiver wasn’t all the way up on the line of scrimmage? Does every big play get checked for a holding penalty on the opposite end of the field? Perhaps we put in a rule that a review can strip away a penalty but can’t create a new one (which from all reports seems to be the approach the league favors). Well that would just incentivize officials to throw more flags, knowing that if they are uncertain it’s only possible to correct a mistake if it goes one way.

Officiating is an almost inescapable conversation these days, but Sunday’s outcome aside, I’m not convinced it’s as big a problem as everyone makes it out to be. The expansion of high definition television, instant replay, and social media has made every single decision subject to instantaneous scrutiny, often by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. One of the defenses I’ve heard from Rams fans is that the officials missed a facemask on Jared Goff that would have given the Rams first and goal from the one on a drive that ended with them settling for a field goal. These complaints get magnified and broadcast so much more than the play itself, which shows that there wasn’t actually a facemask to be called, as the hand merely brushed Goff’s face without grabbing or twisting.

Every sport complains about officials, because officiating is a damn hard job. Especially when it comes to moments like the questionable muffed punt by Julian Edelman that ended up being overturned because the ball passed within a centimeter of both hands and his upper arm. There are hundreds of moments each game that happen at ludicrously fast speeds, with unclear rules and margins so tiny that you sometimes can’t even tell in high definition, slowed down replays.

Are there things that could be done to improve officiating? Probably. It’s a little appalling that most NFL officials are still only part time employees, and that they spend the offseason working other jobs rather than training to be better. Most are probably too old as well, and we would be better suited with officials closer to the physical capabilities of the players they are trying to track. I even think we could discuss adding another one or two officials to the field, though I’m wary that would just result in more penalties.

But in the end there is too much subjective about these games, and there is always going to be an element of human error. And that sucks for a team like the Saints today, but it should honestly just be looked at as one more in a string of hundreds of pieces of luck that go into every game. The Saints lost because the referees blew a call. They also lost because an overtime pass from Drew Brees landed perfectly on the chest of a defender who had fallen onto his back. They also lost because a 48 yard field goal curled twice in the air and snuck inside the right upright. They also lost because sometimes you lose football games you deserve to win, because there is an element of randomness in this game that we would like to ignore in our belief that the best teams win, and that by winning our team proved that it was the best.

The Rams got lucky yesterday for all the reasons I addressed above. The Patriots got lucky by winning a coin toss at the beginning of overtime (and for the people complaining that it’s unfair the Chiefs didn’t get the ball, I’ll point out that on Sunday teams that won the coin toss in overtime were 1-1). Are they the two best teams, or the two most deserving teams? I don’t know. But they’re the two teams that are left, and that’s how sports always work.

Los Angeles Rams 26 – New Orleans Saints 23

I should probably talk about the games themselves, shouldn’t I? Because despite how much everyone is discussing the officiating today, there was a lot more that went down this weekend that decided the teams who will play on Super Bowl Sunday.

It’s easy to forget with everything that came after, but this was very nearly a blowout for the Saints. In the first quarter the Saints scored three times, while the Rams failed to even pick up a first down. The second quarter began with a failed third down conversion that set them up for a punt, and at that point it looked like things were just about over for them. They’d held the Saints to field goals on their first two drives, but the third had ended with them breaking through for a touchdown, and it seemed inevitable that the Saints would score again once they got the ball back and go up three scores.

There were a number of questionably conservative decisions by Sean McVay later in the game, but he deserves credit for calling for the fake punt that turned the game around. If it had failed, the Saints would have been set up for another easy score, and the game likely would have been over. But it didn’t fail, and it gave the Rams an opportunity to drive down the field for points of their own. Even though it was only a field goal, the seven minute drive gave their defense the time it needed to recover, and from that point on they held the Saints in check.

There were worries about the performance of the Saints offense prior to the game, but after they opened with three scoring drives I really didn’t expect them to score only ten points over their final eight possessions. The lack of depth at receiver finally came back to bite them, as the Rams dedicated their coverage to erasing Michael Thomas and forcing Brees to connect with his other receivers. At times this worked—see their second half touchdown drive that involved four completions to Alvin Kamara—but more often than not Brees was unable to locate anywhere else to go with the football.

Taking Thomas away is obviously easier said than done, and a lot of the credit has to go to the Rams defensive front. Aaron Donald made a number of impact plays as he always does, but in the end it was the attention he drew that did most of the damage. The Saints sent two blockers his way on nearly every play, and Ndamukong Suh and Dante Fowler each played their best game during their time with the Rams. Given time even two defenders can’t contain the athletic route running of Thomas and the precision of Brees, but for most of the game the Saints didn’t have that time to work with.

If the story of that side of the ball was the pressure that disrupted Brees, it was the opposite on the other side. The Saints sacked Goff only one time, and it seemed like he was under pressure even less than that. The Rams offensive line held their ground, a stable piece in an offense that looked thoroughly unlike everything we’ve seen from the Rams to this point in the season.

McVay gets a lot of deserved praise as an innovative offensive mastermind, but there were clear tendencies in this offense the entire season. They played three wide receivers on almost every snap, and when they ran the ball with Todd Gurley it was usually a zone or a stretch play to the outside, getting their offense moving laterally and then trusting their talented running back to cut upfield when he saw the opportunity.

The Saints came out ready for this approach, and they shut the Rams down early on. They played a lot more zone coverage than they have in past weeks, which eliminated some of the matchup edges the Rams normally get from their receivers in the slot and made it more difficult for Gurley to find lanes to run through. Had the Rams stuck with what they’d had success with for most of the season, they would have been as limp on offense the entire game as they were in the first half.

Obviously they changed things up. The most glaring difference was the amount of time Gurley spent on the sideline, with CJ Anderson taking over the bulk of the carries. Part of this is likely due to the lingering effects of the injury that forced them to bring in Anderson in the first place, but with the way the Saints defense was playing the downhill, interior rushing style of Anderson was a lot more effective. This was bolstered by the decision to go big along the edges, bringing in an extra tight end to kickstart their power rushing attack.

The Saints couldn’t get pressure on Goff, and the Rams made the adjustments they needed to in order to kick their offense to life. They didn’t have a lot of success attacking down the field, but they picked New Orleans apart with long developing routes to their tight ends, the same routes Brees was unable to find on the other side of the ball. The early surge from the Saints was enough to make the game a tossup in the end, but over the final three quarters and overtime the Rams were clearly the better football team.

New England Patriots 37 – Kansas City Chiefs 31

Another game that had the look of a blowout until it wasn’t. The Chiefs came out just as limp as the Rams did, and their struggles lasted through the second quarter. They didn’t score a point in the first half, and they picked up only 32 yards of offense. A brief appearance in field goal range was wasted by a sack, and only the slow monotony of New England’s offense and a red zone interception by Tom Brady prevented them from being down more than 14-0 at halftime.

Patrick Mahomes had a spectacular season and will likely win MVP, but he deserves to bear the brunt of the blame for their first half offensive woes. As I mentioned above he was responsible for a sack that took them out of field goal range, losing 14 yards to turn a 40 yard field go into a 54 yarder. He also took two other sacks, losing 14 yards on third down in their first possession and 15 yards to kill their attempt to score before the end of the half.

The Patriots had a simple gameplan for the Chiefs. They trusted Stephon Gilmore to match up man to man with Sammy Watkins while they kept a constant double team on Tyreek Hill. Hill has developed as a receiver since entering the league, but he still doesn’t have the route running ability to beat a cornerback underneath without being able to threaten him over the top.

This left very few places for Mahomes to go with the ball on the outside, and he reacted as he often does by trying to make a play. But the Patriots were expecting this as well, and they were more cautious with their pass rush than most teams have been. As Mahomes tried to scramble from the pocket, they had defenders in position to contain him, forcing him deeper into the backfield and turning slight negative plays into major losses.

It took a while, but the Chiefs did eventually figure some stuff out on offense. Partially this was Mahomes actually pulling off some spectacular plays, such as the deep ball he hit to Sammy Watkins after escaping the pocket on their first drive of the second half. They didn’t generate anything running the ball, so they wisely abandoned the run in the second half. Instead they managed to get the ball to Damien Williams through the air, connecting with him on a pair of short passes that he turned into touchdowns.

The problems for Kansas City came, as they usually do, on the defensive side of the ball. On defense they played far too conservatively for most of the game, and it came back to bite them in the end. In the start they were beaten up by the rushing attack of the Patriots, and Sony Michel finished the day with over 100 yards rushing, as he did during their matchup earlier in the year. The Patriots controlled the ball throughout the first half, holding possession for 21 of the possible 30 minutes thanks to their dominance on the ground.

The Chiefs could not stop the Patriots on the ground with their initial defensive plan, and New England wasn’t about to stop handing the ball off. So the Chiefs did the only thing they could, and adjusted by putting an extra run stopper in the game. They controlled New England’s rushing attack better in the second half, but this only opened things up in the back end, as the Chiefs took a coverage player off the field and replaced him with a subpar pass rusher.

Kansas City could get no pressure on Tom Brady the entire game. Partially this is due to New England’s underrated offensive line, but it also stems from the fact that Kansas City couldn’t bring all of Dee Ford, Chris Jones, and Justin Houston while still playing a front with three big defensive linemen. They were afraid to blitz Brady repeatedly, and as the game wore on their defense became too exhausted to keep up with the spread out Patriots attack. They softened into a basic two deep zone that left countless holes underneath, which Brady was able to pick apart with ease.

New England dominated this game in pretty much every facet. They ran twice as many plays as the Chiefs, and only a couple of ugly interceptions by Brady kept Kansas City in the game. And of course, as has become his habit in recent years, Brady erased all memory of his poor performance with some late game heroics (which were almost undone by another late interception that was erased by a trivial penalty).

In truth, this game was likely over from the moment the Patriots took the first drive down the field. New England is too varied on offense for the Chiefs to successfully contain, and their only hope was to get out to an early lead and try to force the Patriots into a one dimensional attack. Even as the game reached its final minutes, the Patriots were almost always in a situation where running the ball was an option, forcing Kansas City into a defensive alignment they didn’t care for. It’s a credit to the Chiefs that they held on into overtime, but in a tight game the odds always favored a New England team that has been here countless times before.