It’s Tough Trying to Make a Living When So Much Is Out of Your Control
One of the key plays in yesterday’s game between the Colts and Ravens was when Peyton Manning hit Reggie Wayne just before the end of the first half. The controversial part of the call was that the game clock was at 0:07. Why risk running a play and possibly not leaving enough time for a field goal?
I had a flashback to the end of the first half of the Chick-Fil-A Bowl between Virginia Tech and Tennessee. There were 9 seconds on the clock and everyone in the stadium thought the Hokies would take a knee. Instead, they threw a bomb and, somehow, their receiver got behind the UT defender and caught the pass, only to be dragged down at about the two-yard-line.  The clock ran out and fans of both sides thought the Vols had dodged a bullet.
Caught on camera (not difficult during today’s telecasts which seemingly have a camera fixed on every important participant - including the star player’s mother) was Va Tech coach Frank Beamer who was running on the field, calling time out as soon as his receiver went down. Sure enough, two seconds were put back on the clock and the Hokies kicked a field goal. When asked by the sideline reporter prior to going into the locker room at halftime about the play, Beamer said he knew the play didn’t take nine seconds because they’d timed it in practice.
In yesterday’s post game press conference, when asked about risking the chance for a field goal, Manning said there were nine seconds to go on the play prior to hitting Wayne, and they chose to run a play (an incomplete pass). He said he didn’t think there was a difference between seven seconds and nine seconds. He knew he was going for a touchdown and if they didn’t get it, there would have been time left. And, not surprisingly, he was right. Wayne scored with three seconds left.
The Colts’ coach, Jim Caldwell, when asked the same question, gave a similar answer. In practice, he said they run those plays and they don’t take but a few seconds. I wonder how many people took note of each coach’s answer. Do coaches really time plays to see how long they take?
When I was an assistant basketball coach at Tennessee, Larry Shyatt, now the associate head coach at Florida, but then an assistant at New Mexico, called me and suggested that we ought to start a self-improvement clinic like the one my former boss, George Raveling, had formed (along with his boss, Gary Colson). We did (I’ve blogged about it a couple times) and it proved to be one of the most innovative -and copied - ideas in coaching.
While George’s was composed of head coaches, ours was a small group of assistants who got together and shared ideas, the main rule being: “no secrets.” I remember when then New York Knicks head coach, Jeff Van Gundy, who started attending the clinic when he was a graduate assistant at Providence, spoke on the topic, “Nine different ways to defend the pick & roll.” At one of the sessions (although I’m no longer in the coaching business, the clinic is still in existence) the topic had to do with “end of game situations.”
We discussed underneath out-of-bounds plays with less than three-tenths of a second left on the clock, plays with between three-tenths and one second, plays with more than one but less than three seconds and plays with four or more seconds. There were discussions about what to run when you had to go the length of the floor with between one and three seconds to go as opposed to four or more seconds (because it was felt every team ought to have a point guard who could go from free throw line to the opposite three-point line in four seconds and either get off a shot or find somebody who had one).
We discussed going for a two or a three when your team was down two.  Things that had to be taken into account where 1) are you home or on the road, 2) are you the favorite or the underdog, 3) is/are your best player(s) available for OT (due to fouling out or injuries), 4) are theirs? All of these situations needed to be practiced so the players would have some sense of familiarity with them.
The point of all of this is when you coach for a living, you spend a great deal of time trying to cover all the situations so your team will be prepared. This doesn’t make coaching any more of an elite profession, just that in most instances there is more to winning than a coach calling time out at the end of the game and yelling:
“The team that wins this game will be the one that wants it more.” Â