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Parent Cafe
4701

NE deserves every accolade for the comeback but it would not have been possible without some truly abysmal playcalling and clock management by the Falcons in the second half.

why was Atlanta consistently snapping the ball with 10-15 seconds left on the clock? run it down to 1 second every time. how many minutes were the Pats gifted by this boneheaded strategy?

8 minutes left, Atlanta 3rd-and-1 in their own territory. you know, i don’t know why some coaches can’t be happy to “just” win a Super Bowl – they have to show how smart and edgy they are in the process. like the Seahawks-Pats SB. oh no, we can’t just hand it off to Lynch at the 1. i’m not your daddy’s offensive coordinator, i’m the edgy 21-century OC who calls a quick slant into heavy traffic to our #4 receiver who caught like 15 passes all season with the Super Bowl on the line – oh no, Malcolm Butler picked it off while my #4 receiver acted like he got shot by a sniper instead of making a strong play for the ball, Pats win, cue end credits.

anyway, i digress. 8 minutes left, Atlanta 3rd-and-1 in their own territory. please just run the ball. it’s the smart call. you get the first down, great; you don’t, punt it. the last thing you want to do is, oh i don’t know, drop back to pass, have a blindside sack and fumble to give NE the ball on your 25 or something. oh, hey, the last thing you want to happen just happened. way to Falcons up that situation.

anyway after the inevitable quick touchdown and 2-pt conversion, Freeman and Jones get you on NE’s 22. that’s a 39-yard FG for an 11-point lead with with 3:00 left. what a great spot to be in! all we need to do is run the ball a couple times, milk some clock, kick the FG, and be world champs! wait, run the ball? how quaint! listen son, safe calls aren’t in the Edgy Coach playbook, we’re gonna zig when they think zag, we’re gonna pass and … oh well, our MVP QB just took a 12-yard sack instead of throwing the ball away, well, a 51-yard FG is still possible … nope, holding call, gotta punt.

i’ve seen this movie before. NE has to make a series of pivotal plays to win and if the opponent stops them just once, the game’s over – and, NE goes ahead and makes every single play they HAVE to make while the opponent writes up their “this one hurts, we’re all so disappointed” speech

4702

It’s amazing how some seemingly very intelligent coaches just seem to lose their minds when the pressure is on.

4703

How would it have been any less (or more) a white victory if Atlanta had won with a white QB, owner, and coach?

4704

Maybe so. But if he had tweeted “Richard Spencer, these guys are all my brothers. Screw you.” I would have loved it.

4705

Best three football hours of my life. I’m still stunned. I almost feel bad for Atlanta…almost.

4706

Three hours? Did you miss the first half? It was about 20 hours long here. I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink from 1 pm until the game was over here at 8:41 pm. Too nervous.

Do you know what I find strange? I watched the entire thing, never flipped a channel, maybe left the room twice. I was trying to keep myself busy by cleaning up some bank statements and adding up my daughter’s QEE and scholarships for taxes. I could only remember ONE commercial (the one for the movie Logan) at the end. I watched the ‘best commercials’ online after, and the only other one I could sort of remember was the one with a stain on Terry Bradshaw’s shirt, but couldn’t remember the product.

I think those companies wasted their money on commercials. I was watching and they made no imprint on my brain. I won’t be buying a Kia or Honda or Skittles or tax prep services or Bud or something to get the stains out of Terry Bradshaw’s shirt. I won’t be going to any of the movies. I miss the Doritos commercials.

4707

Who do you all have in game 2? I think the Falcons come out strong and take it 21-10, and after that it’s a whole new series!

4708

Didn’t really pay attention to the game, but I surprisingly won a few dollars on a gamely bet with a NFL fan who insisted I bet…I happened to choose NE while friend hates them.

Despite much efforts to refuse collecting on the won bet by trying to classify it as a “gentleman’s bet”, my unhappy friend strongly insisted I take the money. Oh well…can’t argue with that…and the free cash.

4709

The only commercial I remember was the violin-playing Einstein for the TV show Genius. That one was funny. The rest was un-funny, forgettable crap to say the least. The game, OTOH, was great. :slight_smile:

4710

Some coaches would have kicked the field goal when they got down to the 22nd yard line. On first down. Others would have called three straight running plays to get the ball right where they wanted it for the field goal.

Monday morning quarterbacking is easy when your team wins.

4711

^ I agree 100% only with the part before “when your team wins.”

4712

The commercials were forgettable for the most part (the cell phone ad parodying 50 shades of gray was a bit funny, also the Melissa McCarthy “environmentalist” slapstick one for Kia). The only thing I did notice was the ads that seemed to be directly trying to make a message about diversity, Coke, Google, Budweiser and the over the top 84 Lumber ad (that you had to watch the conclusion on their website, so many people watched that it crashed), it is kind of interesting that big, bad old corporate america took such a stand during the superbowl:).

4713

I am a Pats fan, and even I was shocked that the Falcons went into a shotgun formation.

4714

I don’t think it’s Monday morning quarterbacking when pretty much every analyst I have heard and every article I have read are beating the carp out of Shanahan for the play-calling in the second half.

You are up by 25 in the Super Bowl with 20 minutes to play. The enemy is the clock. How do you not use up as much clock as possible to give the Patriots the least amount of time as possible? How do you risk the field goal when any number of points more than zero clinches the game?

He said something about the fg being “risky” but your kicker made something like 28/29 from that range or closer this year, and he’s afraid to use him?

The flip side to every great comeback is a team that chokes it away. As Belichick likes to say, “players win games, coaches lose them”. This one is all on the coaches for Atlanta.

4715

One commentator said that with Atlanta, he feels that the coaching staff and players went into the second half thinking they had won the game, and that is a huge mistake. Ever see the tv commercial where the coach is ranting at the players during halftime, and a player raises his hand and says “Coach, we are winning”…I have heard stories about Belichick I think are true, that during halftime when he goes in there even if they are winning, he picks out the mistakes they made in the first half, he also treats it like they are behind. People get mad at Bellichick and other coaches for ‘running up the score’, but the basic idea in a football game is you never assume the game is over until it is over, and I think Atlanta forgot that (not their defense, they simply got run down).

And no, it isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking. In football, the easiest way to prevent a team from scoring is to keep the ball out of their hands, when you have a high powered offense, whether it is Atlanta or NE or whoever, playing ball control is football 101, among other things it gives your defense a chance to rest. It is why Chip Kelley will never be a coach or OC in pro football, because his quick running offense kills the defense, it is why Rex Ryans father punched our Bruce Ariens because Ariens offense was running so quick the D was on the field too long. Atlanta in the second half ran some ridiculously number of small running plays, which made no sense either.

To be honest, it also can be laid to a certain extent at Matt Ryan’s feet. He is a good quarterback, maybe even a great one, but it is on him that he was leaving time on the clock on each play, and great quarterbacks also have latitude in how they execute plays. If the OC calls for a pass play, dump it off to a back in short yardage, run short crossing routes that get first downs but take multiple plays, if you don’t want to audible to a run play, then throw it short. People love long pass plays, but sometimes 10 5 yard plays are much better than one 50 yard one, those 10 plays can take up to 4 minutes of clock time, which when a team is 25 points down with 2 minutes to go in the 3rd quarter is huge, time is the biggest enemy.

People often ask how important coaching is, and the answer is it matters a lot, football is often won in the details, the small things, clock management, play calling, and also is won in how they inspire the team or not. I don’t know who was responsible, but Atlanta’s D before they got gassed was playing well above their level, whoever or whatever inspired them to do that. The NY Jets might have beaten Pittsburgh in the afc championship game several years ago, but in the first half the defense came out uninspired and played sluggishly, and that IMO ended up costing them the game (that I blame on Rex Ryan, almost totally, he fired them up the week before, this game they came in like zombies).

4716

@TonyK


[QUOTE=""]
Others would have called three straight running plays to get the ball right where they wanted it for the field goal. <<

[/QUOTE]

Too bad Atlanta didn’t have one of those coaches. they would be Super Bowl champs.

4717

Part of the reason they got so gassed may be that they were going at 110% at the start of the game. It’s impossible to sustain for an entire game, and I think it’s on the coaches to calm them down a bit.

And it’s not like they were the '85 Bears, the Patriots were having some success moving the ball. They drove inside the Atlanta 30 twice before turning it over each time, and got a field goal the third time. The Pats had over 200 yards of offense in the first half.

4718

It’s like the CFB championship game. Bama’s defense was on the field so much in the 2nd half they ran out of gas. That game and the Super Bowl had eerie similarities.

4719

@notrichenough:
“Part of the reason they got so gassed may be that they were going at 110% at the start of the game. It’s impossible to sustain for an entire game, and I think it’s on the coaches to calm them down a bit.”

That, too, though even if they had played at 100% or 95% they would have gotten gassed, the ratio of time of possession was 2-1 for New England, and no defense, no matter how good, can handle that. The other thing is if they played conservatively in the first half New England might have put up a lot of points. One of the big differences in the halfs was during the first half Atlanta was getting at Brady and knocking him down a lot, and he got woozy (that half hour halftime helped Brady and NE a lot more than Atlanta), when brady threw that pick six it was apparent he was kind of out of it (it looked like a Ryan Fitzpatrick throw, not a Brady one).

I would argue that the defense doing what they did kept Atlanta in the game, and in the end they still almost won it, the loss was caused by a bunch of small things in the end. If the D had played conservatively in the first half and New England put up a lot of points (so let’s say the pick 6 didn’t happen, Atlanta put up their 21 points offensively), let’s say it was tied at halftime, the D still would have gotten tired out based on time of possession, Atlanta’s O likely would not have done squat during the second half, and would have lost that way, too…I think Atlanta’s D basically almost won them the game and the coaching and the offense lost it.

4720

I always hear people scoff when someone prays for their team to win. “God doesn’t care about football!”

I would agree with that if not for that miraculous catch late in the game by Edelman for NE. That seemed like a bit of Divine Intervention to me. :smiley: