Bucs-Lions provides an important lesson about speaking up when something weird is happening
Where have you gone, Bill Belichick?
At a time when the master of situational football can muster only one team to interview him for employment, the rest of the NFL's coaches have shown that they don't understand basic concepts of clock management and timeout usage with the season on the line.
Well, not the rest of them. Two of them. In the same game.
It's amazing, frankly, that both Lions coach Dan Campbell bungled the timing of the taking of knees in victory formation (and the players, including quarterback Jared Goff let him) and Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles failed to call his one remaining timeout after the Lions took a knee on third down with 36 seconds left in the game (and the players, including quarterback Baker Mayfield, let him).
While it's easy and proper to blame the coaches, it was a total failure by both organizations to, from Detroit's perspective, work the clock and, from Tampa's perspective, realize that the clock was not being worked properly.
It's inexcusable that Bucs coach Todd Bowles didn't call the timeout. It's confusing that no one else did, either. When Simms and I discussed this (again) on Wednesday's PFT Live, I made this point: If any of Peyton Manning's various head coaches (Jim Mora, Tony Dungy, Jim Caldwell, John Fox, Gary Kubiak) had failed to call the timeout in a situation like that, Peyton would have done it himself.
This isn't high-level stuff. Anyone who plays Madden knows how to manage the clock. It's basic situational football. How can ownership trust Bowles to make good decisions in the future, when he failed with the season on the line to force the Lions to try a field goal, punt, or go for it with 36 seconds left from the Tampa 32 in a one-score game?
Is it likely the Bucs would have won? No. But there was a non-zero percent chance they'd win if they had called the timeout. By not calling the timeout, their win percentage was nil. It's the most basic analytics-based analysis. Always, always, always call the timeout in that situation.
Flip it around. Campbell dodged a bullet while otherwise daydreaming about biting 49er kneecaps. He didn't tell Goff to let the play clock run down to one second after each play. (Again, a quarterback like Peyton Manning wouldn't have to be told.) At one point, referee Bill Vinovich gestured with exasperation toward the scoreboard after the Lions took a knee with plenty of time left on the play clock.
What if the Bucs had called the timeout? What if they had scored a touchdown and converted the two-pointer? What if they had won the game in overtime? There might have been no coming back for Campbell from blowing the franchise's first berth in the NFC Championship since 1991.
The fact that the football-following world pivoted to Chiefs-Bills caused less attention to be paid to the blunder in the moment. The fact that Chiefs-Bills provided another classic pushed Bucs-Lions a little farther down the stack of Monday talking points.
The moment shouldn't get ignored. Men who hold two of the 32 most coveted jobs in America made blatant, avoidable, incomprehensible mistakes at the same time in the same game. And their staffs and players let them do it.
As a long-time PFT reader pointed out today, it should become an immediate case study on how to handle and not handle end-of-game situations for every coach at every level of football. Looking even deeper, it should prompt organizations to have people in place with the ability and the willingness to get the coach to realize he's about to screw something up in a really irreversible way.
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers explores in one chapter the connection between plane crashes and cultures of intense deference to authority. Basically, the crew realizes the captain is potentially going to crash the plane and — even with their lives on the line — they say nothing because they are wired to submit to the established hierarchy.
NFL organizations would be wise to use the Bucs-Lions situation as a way to ensure that there will be voices that do not defer to the coach. Smart people who realize something bad is about to happen, and they say so. Perhaps a player who is empowered to speak up.
Neither the Bucs nor the Lions had that on Sunday. By September, the Bucs need it. By Sunday, the Lions need it, too.
