Clock management and situational football: A vital component of postseason success and a major contributor to the legacy of a head coach. Perspective from a Bills fan.

This past week’s AFC Championship game got me thinking about how vital decision making and time management are, and I decided to write a piece. Thanks to Saint Doug for getting my wheels turning on this. This is quite the long post, but I’d love to hear fellow fans’ thoughts on it.

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THE ISSUE

Coaching an NFL team is a complicated job. A coach needs to deal with big picture concerns such as philosophy/scheme on both sides of the ball, the overall coaching structure of the team, and long-term personnel decisions, as well as the day-to-day needs that range from strategizing for a weekly opponent to managing the egos of multimillionaires. These are the big, meaty issues facing an NFL head coach, and as viewers and fans, most of these vital, career-defining aspects are happening behind the scenes. We read about them via local reporters and perhaps hear a tidbit or two from a color announcer (and often we read way too much into said tidbits). As a dedicated fan, I enjoy watching these chess games play out, but it’s difficult to understand the depth of it without dedicated insider knowledge.

However, there is one crucial piece of the game that rests solely the shoulders of the head coach that is freely accessible to all of us: situational football and clock management. I have often gotten the feeling that this absolutely paramount piece of the game is secondary in the minds of many head coaches – either they are overwhelmed by the weight of all of their other obligations, they simply haven’t thought deeply about common yet weighty decisions (such as when and why you would call a timeout at 2:08 rather than after the 2 minute warning) and thus they’re unprepared to maximize their team’s opportunities, maybe they don’t understand the opportunity costs of the decisions they make, or worst of all (Rex Ryan) maybe they think it’s not worth caring about.

In some situations we as fans are critical of risky decisions, but that’s largely skewed by outcome – we criticize Belichick’s failed fourth down attempt at his own 28 in 2009 vs the Colts as well as Pete Carroll’s ill-advised goal line pass in the Super Bowl while praising Sean Payton’s ballsy Super Bowl onsides kick. Ignoring those types of decisions, it is still inarguable that there are dozens of games throughout the season where coaches, who are paid millions, make decisions that are objectively bad, particularly when it comes to minimizing risk and maximizing profit at halftime and the end of games.

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THE CONTEXT

As a Bills fan and drought survivor, I am thrilled that we finally found our little oasis and made the playoffs. We got the monkey off our backs and now we can just focus on business. But, I’ve always said that being a one and done or semi-serious playoff team is not good enough, we need to be contenders or I’m just not going to be excited. This begs the question, what’s the difference between a wildcard/one-off divisional winner and a potential champion? There’s the obvious answers – talent on the field and behind the clipboard, drive and heart, discipline, experience, injury status… but there’s also the technically sound in-the-moment technical decisions that define Super Bowl champions, multi-year runs, and dynasties.

We suffered through coaches that looked promising but failed miserably in this regard, and one of the kings of that problem was Doug Marrone. He offered a tough approach to the game and he got a lot out of his players, but my god was his in-game football sense terrible. Marrone’s decision-making was just stupefyingly stupid at times – the Bills more often than not were prepared, played very well, got a lead, then… laid down. For whatever reason, Doug Marrone would never go for the throat and put an opponent out of their misery, he was content to make ultra-conservative decisions to the point that our predictability and poor management made comebacks likely. Sure, he had a winning season, but could he really have competed in the playoffs? Being conservative is often the right call, don’t get me wrong, I’m the guy always yelling to run the damn ball, but you have to play to win.

Cue this past week’s AFC Championship game where Marrone/Hackett decided it would be wise to lay down before the half rather than execute a 2 minute drive despite having 54 seconds, 3 timeouts, and a killer gameplan that had Blake Bortles putting Belichick and Patricia on the ropes. Then in the second half, the gameplan became run Fournette repeatedly into 9 man boxes which lead to bad % downs and distances. His team’s talent and swagger couldn’t handle the poor decision making coming from the top. The spirit of the Jaguars team practically begs for the opportunity to win it on their own merits, but oh no, Doug Marrone just wanted them to meekly hold on and edge out the reigning champions. This has been widely criticized as poor situational football, the decisions were far too conservative for the situation.

Similarly, I was at best mildly optimistic when the Bills hired Rex Ryan in 2015. He seemed to be a good contrast to Marrone’s rigidness, and he certainly had the resume on paper after leading the Jets to back to back AFC Championship games in 09-10, but what were his strengths and weaknesses? His players were next-level motivated (for a couple years) and he had an at the time not-yet decoded complex defensive scheme, but his teams were undisciplined and he was poor when it came down to the details such as time/possession management. Thus, was it surprising that his teams maxed out at ‘surprisingly deep into the playoffs’? Those details are what matters when you’re playing against one of the other top 4 teams in the league, you need to absolutely crush your opponents if you’re not willing or able to tend to every last detail. Odds are you’re not going to crush your conference championship opponent so you need every edge you can get. Rex was incapable of securing that competitive edge, and it showed, especially once his defensive scheme lost its luster.

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THE DATA

On that note, here is a table of every head coach in every divisional championship and Super Bowl from the past decade:

Things that stand out to me:
1 – Super Bowl coaches by and large run a tight ship and are detail-oriented. A majority of them are noted disciplinarians, like Belichick, Coughlin, and the Harbaughs
2 – These coaches tend to show up repeatedly
3 – Coaches that have a reputation for poor in-game decisions and clock management have a hard time breaking through to the Super Bowl (e.g. Andy Reid, Rex Ryan, ) unless they had a HoF caliber QB (anyone who had Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers, Cam helped Rivera a lot too in 2015)
4 – These coaches tend to be a flash, they’ve got one, maybe two shots

There’s plenty more points to be made about this list (e.g. aggressive style seems prevalent), but in the end it’s a small sample size and it’s only so valuable, but it’s good food for thought. It would be great to expand this to the divisional round as well, but I’ll save that for another time.

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THE FUTURE

There are things I really like about Sean McDermott. He’s got a long term plan (dat process) and he’s sticking to it. He’s got the players into it. He’s not afraid to try things and make fairly radical changes. He’s clearly got the mind to build a team that’s got a shot every year.

My lingering question though… can he fix his in-game decision making? Over and over this year I watched the Bills squander a possession or give away points at the end of a half because they played poor situational football. These are simple calculations, but I fear that McDermott falls into one of the aforementioned categories, either not attentive to this issue due to distraction or lack of understanding. In my many decades of watching football, coaches either have the ability to maximize in-game situations or they don’t, there’s rarely improvement. This makes some sense to me intuitively, it seems like it’s a “you either get it or you don’t” scenario, and there’s not a ton of opportunity to train oneself in these situations unless you’re an obsessive-type or you play a ton of Madden.

The optimist in me thinks that this year was a surprise to both McDermott and Beane – they expected a middling rebuilding-type year, as evidenced by the preseason moves to trade theoretically elite talent for solid contributions and future picks, and perhaps McDermott was significantly more focused on installing his mentality and approach (dat Process) than attending to the nitty gritty details. Admittedly as an outside observer, I’m likely biased towards believing the things that I can see are more important than they really are, perhaps this issue is dwarfed by something like scouting the opponent.

Personally though, the realist part of me says that this will always be a concern, especially with Belichick lurking in the background. Imagine, if you will, a coach’s ability in each of his duties as a piston in a six cylinder engine. Even if five out of the six cylinders are running full bore, if you can’t get the last one up to snuff, you’re rarely going to be able to compete with those who can, even if you can get a little bit more out of each of the other pistons.

I worry that we may have to endure poor clock management, poor situational football, questionable challenge calls, and all sorts of suboptimal in the moment top-down decision making. My experience watching why previous Bills coaches have struggled and why certain teams succeed concerns me - something as small as a touchy penalty can alter games, so not having the ability to maximize controllable opportunities on your side is the difference between the division and the wild card, or having a bye week, or winning a championship. I fear that we’ll max out at Andy Reid – great coach, nearly fires on all cylinders, but always gets edged out just before the top tier by more efficient decision makers.

We’ll have to hope that The Process overall will be powerful enough to overcome these issues and that our overtuned 5/6 cylinders can make up for the deficient sixth, or that McDermott will aggressively tackle this issue going forward. Despite this capital concern, we haven’t had reason to be this optimistic in a long time… in the past, I’d say it’s just Lucy just holding the football out to fool us once again, but I’m looking forward to being able to truly Billieve again.