1. If the past two weeks have taught NFL head coaches anything, it’s that we—you, me, media people, fans, you know, goobers with internet connections—will never let you live it down if you make a clock-management mistake.
Each head coach in the postseason will have made tens of thousand of decisions—most of them good—in order to get his team into that position. They’ll make hundreds more during a game. The vast majority of those decisions? We’re not qualified to make them ourselves in any capacity. (If I was the head coach of an NFL team, regardless of talent, we’d lose every game by 80 and I’d be heckled mercilessly by fans, players, and loved ones.)
But the clock management stuff is different. Most of us have played Madden. All of us understand basic arithmetic. So whether it was Mike McCarthy’s team botching an end-game situation, literally letting the final seconds of their season bleed away in a manner that suggests they don’t grasp the forward march of time (or, at least the human species’ shared perception of the forward march of time). Or Sean McDermott’s kicker blasting a kickoff into the end zone and failing to burn some of the precious final seconds or regulation that the Chiefs desperately needed. Those are the mistakes that will live in infamy and brand a coach forever.
