On Playing To Win The Game
Why the discourse around Brandon Staley's decision to put the dagger in Kansas City Sunday is superfluous.
The Los Angeles Chargers pulled out one of the most improbable wins of the young season so far Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium. Kansas City was coming off a rough second week game, losing in prime time to the Baltimore Ravens. Generally, Patrick Mahomes thrives in bounceback games, especially against divisional rivals. However, Kansas City was uncharacteristically sloppy with the football, turning it over four times to the Chargers’ zero. Even with such a discrepancy in ball security, the Chargers only won by six points. That margin of victory came from a touchdown in the late fourth quarter.
The Chargers got into the red zone with 41 seconds left on the clock, game tied at 24. The common wisdom states that a team on the road against a favored divisional rival should probably sit on the ball, run time off the clock, and try for a field goal with three or four seconds left in the game. Such a move would suffocate the other team’s chances of winning. Chargers head coach Brandon Staley and his offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi did not abide by that common wisdom. On the next two plays, the Chargers gained all 20 yards they’d need to score a touchdown, both from standout second year quarterback Justin Herbert to veteran wide receiver Mike Williams. Kicker Tristan Vizcaino, however, borked the PAT attempt. The lead would remain at six. However, there were 32 seconds on the clock, more than enough time for Mahomes to throw a few quick darts down the field to get into the end zone for to reestablish the tie at the very least. He would not succeed, however, as the Chargers defense did its job and kept the high-octane Kansas City offense one yard positive from midfield.
The commentators, Jim Nantz and Tony Romo, bristled at the strategy, saying that the Chargers “scored too quickly.” Many analysts, whether professional or amateur, did the same thing in real time on social media. Why would you give a once-and-future NFL MVP a chance to win the ballgame when you could have suffocated his team and kept that offense on the sideline? Later that evening, the 49ers would have no luxury of controlling a field goal attempt. They had to get into the end zone, and they did, with Jimmy Garoppolo finding Kyle Juszczyk for a 12-yard strike with 37 seconds left on the clock. Aaron Rodgers didn’t have to work that hard to get his team into field goal range. It’s not a one-to-one comparison at all, but the lesson seemed to remain the same. You don’t give elite quarterbacks enough rope to hang you. The results came out satisfactory for the Chargers, but people who like to hammer home “process over results” were talking about it even a day after it happened. Staley and Lombardi got away with a huge strategical error, according to people with high-minded opinions on football.
I don’t think they made a mistake though. The Chargers were right to go for paydirt and not worry about how much time they used to do it. In the moment, I thought it was a great idea, partially for selfish reasons (Herbert is my fantasy football QB), but mostly for feeding a conceptual zeitgeist. Your goal on offense should always be to score a touchdown and not microstrategize field position, whether vertically or horizontally. You want to make the defense capitulate to you on every possession, even ones where time is a premium. Field goals are for cowards. A field goal signifies a defensive win in the 2021 National Football League, a place where even the 1985 Bears or 2000 Ravens would be overwhelmed. Offense is how you play to win the game.
Jim Mora, in one of his infamous postgame rants, once replied to a reporter with a question that he found snarky that “You play to win the game!” The idea of going for it on fourth down and manageable distance (and not as a steadfast rule no matter what context), forgoing field goals when your offense is inside the other team’s five-yard line, seizing opportunities, those are all ideas one adopts when they PLAY TO WIN THE GAME. Settling for field goals is a compromise position based on the inability to gain enough yards to continue a drive towards the end zone. In a general sense, strategizing to get field goals is adopting cowardice, but football games are not exercises in absolutes. Again, the lessons one can learn from Kevin Kelley and the Presbyterian Blue Hose aren’t just applicable to college. Sometimes, you play to win the game by doing more than blasting through field position and scoring tuddies at will. You can wrap your tendrils around the helpless clock, suck all the time for yourself, and punch through with an “easy” field goal to keep Mahomes off the field of play.
However, there was strategic merit to punching the ball in the end zone, more than playing a 1980s NFL head coach’s game of playing footsie with field position and optimizing the shot for your kicker to send a kick sailing through the uprights. In this case, there was empirical, visual evidence that Tristan Vizcaino may not have won the game had he gotten the opportunity. A NFL PAT attempt is kicked at a distance of 32 yards. Had the Chargers not gotten a single extra yard when they arrived at the KC 20-yard line, Vizcaino would have had to attempt the kick from 37 yards out1. If he had missed from 32 yards out for the PAT, that 37-yard kick was not guaranteed for sure.
The next point of focus is “what if they had kicked when they got down to the four-yard line?” and I get the idea to want to micromanage a game to maximize the best results. I do. Again, NFL viewers later that night would see what an elite quarterback could do with enough time to move the ball. That being said, there’s a certain level of swagger one gets from punching a ball into the end zone for six points from that close that you don’t derive from kicking a field goal. Now I’m getting into intangible things like adrenaline, body language, confidence, and other things that meatheads love to think can be measured. Just because they cannot be quantified does not mean they aren’t real. When sportscasters talk of “momentum,” it is not real in a sense that it is a thing that exists by itself, but the components of it, the real physical and mental components of what can turn the tide of a game are 100 percent genuine. Even if they’re not quantifiable, they do have a real effect.
What happens when Herbert is able to finish what he has started and score a touchdown is give him an unbelievable lift in confidence. Rather than shirking back from making a big throw because his coach didn’t believe in him enough to finish the drive, he can go forward in future games and take the kind of risks that pay of big for teams that win the title. Sure, you risk giving the ball back to a dangerous offense with time, but for however many times Mahomes, Rodgers, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, Joe Montana, any elite quarterback in history have led epic comebacks, they also have many late game failures at their feet. Sometimes, you take that risk because you want to reap other benefits.
And yes, the consequence of that calculated risk is that you give the ball back to Mahomes, a guy who not two weeks ago showed that he can throw a game-changing ball in a matter of seconds. However, scoring six points means he has to take the ball from, presumably, his own 25-yard line and drive it an entire 75 yards to win. Unlike Rodgers, he couldn’t have just chunked out 40 yards or so to give his kicker, Harrison Butker (who has one of the better legs in the league), a shot at tying or winning. Furthermore, there was real evidence that this time, Mahomes could have been denied. He threw two interceptions. His ballcarriers had two fumbles to that point. This Mahomes-Andy Reid offense even beyond the turnovers has also felt underwhelming because they don’t have a Sammy Watkins-level player anymore to keep teams honest. It’s one thing not to let Tyreek Hill or Travis Kelce beat you. It’s a whole other when no one else on the team is able to make you pay for shadowing both of them. In fact, as a direct result of the last two games, Kansas City took a chance on Josh Gordon to see if he could give them the spark that they’d been missing so far this season.
All in all, the calculated risks that the Chargers took paid off, and if you look at them more closely, you will find the risks really weren’t all that different either way. I’m a firm believer in analytics, but there are some areas where determining a raw probability of winning with equations doesn’t tell the whole story. Until variables can start to account for things like the mental states of players or other immeasurable quantities, sometimes, you have to play to win the game at the most conceptual and spiritual levels. If that means giving the football back to the best player in football with half-a-minute on the clock, so be it. Winning football at the molecular level means scoring touchdowns. I will never, EVER criticize a coach who prioritizes that over rearranging deck chairs to make sure his mercurial and streaky kicker has the best conditions to score at least three fewer points than if they made it all the way to the end zone.
For those unfamiliar with American football reading this, a kick-through-the-uprights in American football is not kicked from the spot of the line of scrimmage. The uprights are placed in the back of the end zone, which is located ten yards from the goal line. The ball is not kicked from the actual line of scrimmage, but from a spot seven yards behind it. So, deciding to kick a field goal when you’ve reached the 20-yard line means the kick will be 20 yards in length, plus ten yards for the length of the end zone, plus the seven extra yards you’ll have to kick to reach the line of scrimmage, or, 37 yards.