Sloppy Seconds

[captainsblog]

You want another reason why I don't bet on sporting events? How about thirteen of them?

It was already a wild and woolly weekend going into Sunday night. Both top-seeded NFL teams, the only ones still given a week off to rest their starters, lost on Saturday on last-second field goals. Then The Hated Tom Brady (who I should just start calling THTB) roared back from a 27-3 deficit to tie the Rams, only to lose at home on, what else?, a last-second field goal.  That left only Da Bills, on the road in KC where they'd already won during the regular season, to take on the Chiefs in the weekend prime time finale.... and with the AFC title game to be hosted in our own friendly confines next Sunday if they won.

I couldn't watch.  For one thing, Eleanor can't stand the game.  But the nervousness gets to me, and besides, there are better ways to be visually entertained while the news comes through via (a) a small portable AM radio, (b) Teh Interwebs, and (c) the screams of neighbors from two doors away telling me every time the Bills scored.  Through those, I knew it was tied at 14 near halftime, then Buffalo down by 9, then down by only 5, but suddenly up by 3 with barely two minutes left.

Now I put the radio on full-time, as we were just getting started.

Boom! KC touchdown and extra point and we're down four with just over a minute on the clock.

Bang! Instant response, Bills TD and PAT and we're back up by 3 with, are you ready?

Thirteen seconds to go.

Twelve or fourteen would have been so much better. No shoutouts to the Last Supper, or the goofiest chapter of bankruptcy, or the CONTROL agent hiding in the mailbox.  Still. Everyone, from the CBS analyst to millions of Bills Mafiosi, all agreed: it was over and done.



Except, it was more like this:



The Bills still had to kick off to the enemy and give them a fair shot at getting into field goal range in those ridiculously few number of seconds.  Now's when the rules come into play.  Unlike in what the rest of the world calls "football," where the clock stops for nothing, NFL clocks stop after each score, and the ball is then kicked by the scorer to the scoree (except after a safety, or maybe if they touch the opposite pole).  And, this is key, three things can happen, only one of which restarts the clock:

* The kicker can kick it into the field of play, where the clock restarts as soon as a player on either team touches it;

* The kicker can kick it out of bounds along the field of play, which takes no time off the clock and the receiving team starts at its own 40 yard line (this is known as "excellent field position" and it therefore rarely happens except by accident); or

* The kicker can kick it beyond the field of play, over everybodys' heads. This results in a "touchback," which on kickoffs places the ball as the receiving team's 25 yard line and, the key part, no time comes off the clock.

Kickoff returns are among the most exciting extended plays in all of American football. They're also among the most dangerous, as a single runner with the ball is basically up against 11 burly behemoths determined to stop him. Many serious injuries have resulted, including to at least one former Bill who was paralyzed while trying to stop a kick returner. So the league has taken steps to discourage the practice, including moving the "default" start on a touchback from the 20 to the 25, and limiting the formations both teams are allowed to use.  There's regular talk of eliminating them altogether. Still, they're in the playbooks now, and the Bills had to choose between the second and third of the above alternatives (and pray that the kicker didn't pull off the first) as they lined up with those 13 seconds left.

He booted it halfway to Nebraska. No time off the clock. KC first down at its own 25.

Armchair coaches have spent the ensuing 48-ish hours saying we should have kicked it into the field of play so time would have come off the clock during the return.  At postgame pressers, the Bills brain trust has been evasive on why, or even if, they chose this course; there's at least an implication that their strong-legged kicker may have been told to kick it shorter but he couldn't or didn't. There's another factor, though, which they would never admit:

Among the memories that haunt our collective city consciousness is of another playoff game a not so longago Bills team lost to the Tennessee Titans in Nashville, also in the final seconds of a game after a kickoff.  Fans of the ultimate winning team in that game (which went all the way to the Super Bowl that year) call it the "Music City Miracle," while we prefer to refer to the "illegal forward lateral." Judge for yourself (stupid NFL won't allow it to be embedded). That play stands in our Sports Hall of Shame next to Wide Right from Super Bowl XXV, and No Goal from the Dallas-Sabres Stanley Cup finals, so any Bills coach who admitted to allowing a kickoff return with scant seconds remaining would be drawn and fourth-quartered.

So, from first and ten from the KC 25, their quarterback (son of a former Mets pitcher and selected via a draft pick traded to KC by, um, us in 2017) did what he'd done all game and all year: Patrick Mahomes moved the ball down the field, into his kicker's range, and on the last play of regulation, the game wound up tied on, you guessed it, a last-second field goal.

Which brings us to moar ruulz you need to know.

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Nature abhors a vacuum, and sportball fans abhor games ending in a tie.  NFL football is the only major North American sport (sorry, soccer:P) to allow them at all, but they've added limited overtime to regular season games (one or two a year still end in ties) and as-long-as-it-takes OT in the playoffs. 

Overtime begins, as the games originally do, with a coin toss. The visiting team's captain gets to call the flip, and until Sunday, our beloved quarterback Josh Allen was 9-for-9 in calling the toss in the eight road games (and one overtime) he was called on to. Josh's luck at coin flips ran out at the start of Sunday night's game, but the opening kickoff call is less significant. It just determines which team gets the ball in the first half, and the other one will almost always get it to start the second.  But the OT coin flip means more, because the winner of the toss will invariably elect to receive the ball and has a much higher probability of winning, often without the toss loser even getting a single possession. Until around 2010, it was true "sudden death," meaning that if the receiving team scored first by any means (touchdown or even a field goal), it was game over and Sorry, Charlie to the other team's offense.  The rule, as now implemented, requires the receiving team to score a touchdown to deprive the other guy from getting a turn.  Even that, though, has seemed patently unfair in years as recently as 2019, when THTB beat those same KC Chiefs in an OT game where the KC quarterback never got a turn.

So naturally, in keeping with the Buffalo Tradition of Accursed Doom, Josh called tails, it was a head, KC received and scored a TD in about three seconds, and we never got the ball back.

By all accounts, it was the most Fantastic Finish of a football game anybody could remember, and it's led to People Having Ideas about how to fix the rule. Why not just play a fixed OT period, or two or eight or as many as it takes, as MLB, NBA and NHL playoff games all do?  My guesses are television and bookies.  While NFL games get great ratings, it still disrupts regular network schedules, and you can only sell so many ads during a six hour prolonged game.  Let's also not forget the gambling aspect: longer games can significantly change expected point spreads and over-under point totals, and no matter how much the NFL has "discouraged" illegal betting on their games, they know how important the bookies are to maintaining interest in their games year-round, even among perennial losers.

So any change is likely to be a tweak of the current system to keep overtime short and sweet.  Of a few ideas I've seen mentioned, my favorite one comes from one of the coaches in the league, modeling the solution to the "one cuts the cake, the other picks the slice" dessert dilemma. The coin toss winner gets to either "spot" where the ball will be placed to start OT, or "choose" whether to take the ball or defend from that spot.  You have to pick something that's hard, but not too hard, lest you get stuck with starting there yourself.  Trouble this weekend, though, is I don't think it would have mattered. After winning the toss, I think Kansas City would have let the Bills pick the spot. Even if we started Mahomes at his own 1 yard line, with our defenders so gassed at that point (one of our best players on defense went down with an injury after the tying FG), I still think they would've driven the 99 yards to a TD and we STILL would never have had a chance to respond.

In the end, I think it really comes down to the Syndicate still running the country, just like it did in the 90s:
 

Watch on YouTube

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To end on a good note, though, we got word today that Kansas City fans have been honoring our team's close-but-no-cigar amazing performance by making donations to our quarterback's charity fund, which supports Buffalo's comprehensive Children's Hospital.  This generosity follows efforts that Bills fans have made over the years to donate to charities of opposing players who beat a common enemy or suffered an injury in a game against us, or if they just decided would be a good way of paying it forward pass.

To rub it in a little, a lot of the donations (exceeding $80,000 at last count) have been for $13 or increments based on it.  Not being one to turn down a good cause, I've encouraged fellow Bills fans to repay the kindness by donating to Patrick Mahomes's designated charity-

15 and the Mahomies Foundation
1701 Directors Boulevard, Suite 370
Austin, TX 78744

- but, to rub it back a little bit, send maybe two bits, or even better, a dollar or two.

In coin.



Heads, the kids win, tails, nobody loses, and everybody gets a chance;)