of Broncos lost the first game of Russell Wilson He missed a 64-yard field goal attempt with 20 seconds remaining on Monday night. The offense bled about 30 seconds behind the clock as he spaced out his teammates and corrected his receiver position before finally taking a timeout. Turn on the kicking unit.
In these moments, we all want to picture ourselves doing some cool coaching. Aviator over the eyes lowers his shades and follows his intuition to dial up some sort of finger-pistol-inducing football trick. Lay in your back pocket and set game-winning field goals more easily. You would imagine the opposite of what Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett did. It took the franchise years of draft capital and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get quarterbacks.
Of course, that’s not what happened.despite being on a call analytically defensible (As ESPN pointed out, if you ran the numbers from the 20 second mark instead of the 50 second mark), we plan to spend the space and time between the end of week 1 and the beginning of week 2 roasting the Broncos. It is our readily available nutritional fruit. The kick came off a few inches. We all had a good time pointing out we would have done otherwise.
Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett defended his late-game strategy during Monday’s post-game press conference.
Stephen Brashear/AP
After looking at the defense Wilson had seen practically every day for 10 years, we decided (albeit terribly slow) that the Broncos might not have had as good a converted shot as we thought given their play. It doesn’t matter though. Call pocket or field personnel. It doesn’t matter that Wilson himself may have been a little shaken at the moment, and that his coach decided to let him off the hook early in the season. , who knows what the heck is going on in the odds charts of the team’s particular analysts, out of the mouths of the special teams’ coaches and confident kickers, or inside the little synapses firing relentlessly me Our brains often have conflicting information streams. The line between cool coaching and really bad coaching can be very thin, even if you don’t want to see it that way.
Once upon a time Pete Carroll himself did some very uncool coaching as well. Brian Dabor, widely loved for his very cool coaching this weekend, was sniffed out by two Titans defenders in the backfield and shoveled a shovel pass to the running back for the winning 2-point conversion. dialed up. The repressed anger of a running back who had to spend the last four years in schematic football hell. Plus, that cool coaching had to miss a Titans field goal to solidify as cool.
What matters now is the moment that comes next. Hackett, and by extension Wilson, were the ill-fated protagonists of the NFL’s opening week. They threw tomatoes. They had to toddle off the stage and roll their pants around their ankles. They can make one of the biggest acquisitions of the offseason a comical flop, or do some cool coaching together for the next.
We’ve seen how debilitating individual moments can be for a coach.Monday was as informative as any live tutorial I’ve ever witnessed about the high-wire rigors of a position.In front of 80,000 people. It’s impossible to know what it’s like to be an NFL head coach until the weight of the game is on your chest. One of the few ways he can prevent it from happening again is to go through the worst and then move on.
I don’t know how it will play out in Denver, one of the more difficult and hot markets in the NFL. Where the new owners are getting a feel for the operation. What we do know is that there is a tangible truth to what coaches say when cool coaching works. If they don’t hit, they are idiots.
That’s how whimsical this is. How easy it is for us to forget what happened on Monday, when the next Monday comes, and the moment of desperation has passed.
Other NFL Coverage:
.
Comments
Post a Comment