Few mistakes in sports are more baffling than clock-management mishaps in football. NFL staffs have dozens of coaches, some with vague titles like "quality control" or "game management" suggesting they should at minimum know how to avoid colossal blunders involving the proper use of timeouts.
And yet, Week 5 was a clock-management disaster class. It's hard to think of a weekend that had more moments in which fans at home, announcers in the booth, and entire stadiums were united in saying some version of "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
Let's start with the craziest incident, which is probably also the easiest to explain: Washington failing to attempt a field goal at the end of overtime against the New York Giants. The Commanders were in decent range for a kick, but they called a second-down pass with 12 seconds on the clock and no timeouts. Quarterback Jayden Daniels went down after an ill-fated scramble without attempting that pass, and the team couldn't get another play off before time expired.
Head coach Dan Quinn and various players, including Daniels, have indicated that they knew they were out of timeouts, but that doesn't make sense. If the quarterback knew the absolute worst thing he could do was to allow the clock to keep running, why did he do exactly that, especially when he didn't rush to get back to the line? He either thought there was another timeout available or didn't understand the significance of not having one.
Most of the blame falls on Daniels for that - team leader and all. However, it's fair to ding Quinn and his staff for not making it clear to their quarterback that the Commanders had a win in their hands when he took that final snap - as long as he didn't screw it up. And then he did. The 25 seconds of audio from the coaches to Daniels' helmet before that play would be a fascinating listen.
The end of the Eagles-Jaguars game in London wasn't quite so simple, but it was just as galling from a Philadelphia perspective. The Eagles had played poorly but were in position to steal a win as the clock wound down, trailing by two points. A Jalen Hurts pass to Dallas Goedert left them with first down on the Jacksonville 34-yard line with 25 seconds left and the Jags holding just one timeout.
From there, a field-goal attempt would be from 51 yards. Would you rather be a bit closer? Sure. But what's really important here is making sure that the kick is the final play of the game. Force the Jags to burn that timeout on first down, and then you can do whatever you want on second and third down. (The Eagles still had a timeout of their own.)
Instead, for reasons only known to head coach Nick Sirianni and his staff, the Eagles had Hurts throw on first down (incomplete) and then again on second down, but to the sideline, which stopped the clock. Those two plays burned 8 whole seconds. Then the Jags stuffed an Eagles run - which the whole stadium had been expecting - and called their timeout, stopping the clock with 12 seconds left.
Amazingly, Sirianni was not done screwing up. After the Eagles scored their field goal, they allowed a kick return instead of kicking it through the end zone, and Jacksonville turned a 53-yard return into an immediate game-winning field goal.
Much of the criticism of Sirianni after the game focused on the touchback-versus-kickoff decision, which is at least a debate, but the stuff before that was even worse. There was no way Jacksonville should have gotten the ball again. It was all in Philadelphia's hands. Sirianni famously does not call plays on either side of the ball, so is it too much to ask that he get basic clock management right? (Evidently, yes.)
In the Bills-Rams Monday nighter, Joe Brady and Sean McVay seemingly dueled to see which head coach could make a worse late-game call. We begin with Josh Allen scrambling for a first down at the Rams' 5-yard line with 1:48 to go and the Bills down by six points. Obviously, they needed a touchdown, but just as obviously, after a second half in which Matthew Stafford and the Rams' offense had torched Buffalo's defense, they needed to take a lot of time off the clock. Instead, James Cook scored on second down, 4 seconds later.
Now, it's probably hard to convince your players to not try to score a touchdown, especially when one of those players is Allen, the football equivalent of an excitable Labrador retriever. But Brady needed to figure out a way to make the case, since the alternative was scoring quickly and giving Stafford the ball with tons of time left. Stafford ultimately got 92 seconds after the kickoff, and he didn't even need to use a timeout before the Rams scored and sent the game to overtime.
Soon it was McVay's turn to cause his team's fans to slap their foreheads. After the Rams recovered a Cook fumble that put them in position to win the game on their first OT possession, they marched into Buffalo territory and had a third-and-5 on the Bills' 30-yard line with almost five minutes left.
Buffalo's defense was like the armless knight in the Monty Python sketch at this point. Stafford was shredding the unit with ease, and Puka Nacua had approximately a million catches for a billion yards. A first down would have allowed the Rams to cruise into chip-shot field-goal range. Instead, McVay was conservative and settled for a no-gain run on third down that brought about a 48-yard attempt from shaky kicker Harrison Mevis. The attempt was blocked.
Did McVay really think his chances were better with a long Mevis kick than a short Stafford pass? Bills fans, who know something about missed kicks from about that range, were thrilled to see the Rams try it.
And the shenanigans still weren't finished. A couple of Allen scampers got the Bills into field-goal range, and Brady, coming out of the two-minute warning, sent Tyler Bass out to kick a 45-yarder on second down. Instead of eating some clock and getting Bass a little closer, he opened the door for an easy Rams win if Bass missed the kick.
Bass made the field goal, but given everything else that happened in Week 5, it would have been entirely fitting if he'd missed.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
