This past Thursday, as befits Thanksgiving Day, the Chicago Bears were squaring off against the much superior, at least if win-loss records are to be believed, Detroit Lions. While the end result, that of a Bears loss, was perhaps not at all unexpected, it was how they lost, and in particular the utter confusion that reigned during the final 32 seconds of the contest, that attracted national attention.
To set the stage – in the last minute of the game, the Bears were down 20:23 and driving on the Detroit side of the field with a single timeout remaining. A second down sack pushed the line of scrimmage back to the Detroit 41, with 32 seconds left on the clock.
At this juncture, there are basically two options for any team in this situation. The first is to immediately burn their last timeout and organize themselves to run a quick pass play, either to the outside, where the receiver can stop the clock by running out of bounds, or in the hopefully-empty middle of the field, leaving the field goal unit with about 25 seconds to run onto the field and attempt a fire drill field goal. The second option, in turn, is to take around 10-15 seconds to quickly line up and run a play, then call a time out with about 10 seconds remaining to set up a more leisurely field goal attempt. Quite obviously, this latter approach should be reserved only for the very well-coached teams that actually can run back to the line of scrimmage and line up that quickly, and whose quarterback can organize everyone while keeping track of the clock.
In reality, the Bears took their time lining up, with their rookie quarterback then taking even more seconds to apparently change the play at the line, finally snapping the ball with all of six seconds remaining. And attempting to throw long to a covered receiver running in the general direction of the Detroit endzone, not a quick slant or a quick out that could at least conceivably have left a second or two for a timeout to be called. Naturally, by the time the ball hit the ground, the game was over, and so was, effectively, the tenure of the Bears’ then head coach, Matt Eberflus, who was officially fired the following morning, though to be fair, the Thanksgiving Day defeat had been merely the last straw to break this particular camel’s back.
In the post-game press conference, Eberflus insisted that the idea had, in fact, been the second alternative described above – to run a quick play with the clock running before calling a timeout on fourth down. This, then, was his first failure as a head coach, misperceiving his team, and his quarterback, as sufficiently prepared to line up, call a play and snap the ball in about 15 seconds. This is, in fact, a fairly difficult task to execute, which is why the default conservative option is to call a timeout immediately and then tell the special teams unit to get ready for a 20-second fire drill. Teams like the old Belichick-Brady Patriots, or the new Reid-Mahomes Chiefs, or maybe even the present iteration of the Detroit Lions, can risk saving the timeout in this situation. The 4-7 Bears captained by a rookie? On paper, it would seem not, and that is precisely how things played out in reality.
Which leads us to the second, abject failure of Eberflus this past Thursday – just standing there and staring as the clock slowly ticked down from 32 seconds to zero. By the time the clock approached 10 or even 15 seconds, it was clear even to the announcers in the booth that the Bears were utterly befuddled, and at that point a head coach with two brain cells to rub together should have burned his last timeout. Hoping that a rookie quarterback, and not the greatest rookie quarterback of all time, will somehow manage to salvage the situation at that point is, at best, savagely optimistic. Yet Eberflus stood pat and just watched.
It is possible to conjecture that Eberflus, once committed to having his quarterback run a third-down play with the clock running, was simply hoping with every passing second that maybe now the ball will finally be snapped, and maybe there will still be a second or two left at the end of that play. Sports in general are not about “maybes”, nor is American Football. Sometimes bad process does, in fact, through sheer luck or happenstance, produce good results, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. And this past Thanksgiving Day, one Matt Eberflus, former head coach of the Chicago Bears, amply demonstrated just what bad process, in this case in the form of horrific clock management, typically leads to.