2nd & 2

[cherdano]

Regarding momentum: even if it were a real thing (I disagree! Well, mostly.), I just cannot believe a team would gain momentum from scoring two field goals from the one yard line. A drive ending at the one yard line with a field goal feels like ending with a failure. And it feels that way because it does end with a failure. No team will feel really good about it.

[mgoetze]

Wait, what? The Pro Bowl has a rule that you MUST play a 4-3 base defense and can't have more than 4 DBs on the field? The offense gets to use 3 WRs and a TE who is surely not selected on the basis of his blocking skills and the other team can't even match in a nickel? That is so stupid.

[mgoetze]

Wait, what? The Pro Bowl has a rule that you MUST play a 4-3 base defense and can't have more than 4 DBs on the field? The offense gets to use 3 WRs and a TE who is surely not selected on the basis of his blocking skills and the other team can't even match in a nickel? That is so stupid.

I mean, it is kinda funny to watch Clay Matthews play nickelback, but if the point of the Pro Bowl is to see the best players at their respective positions, well...

[billw55]

Well, they aren't really playing football in the Pro Bowl anyway, so I see no reason this should bother me.

[Bbradley62]

Isn't this like the no-defense-allowed NBA All-Star game, where the lowest score for either team in the past 5 years was 138?

[ArtK78]

Isn't this like the no-defense-allowed NBA All-Star game, where the lowest score for either team in the past 5 years was 138?

Or the laughable NHL all-star game, which resulted in a 17-12 final score. I think the losing team missed a 2-point coversion somewhere along the way.

[andrei]

Lol at Pete Carroll

And you guys thought McCarthy was bad?

 

Seattle should go for a RB in offseason, apparently they don't have anybody they can trust to go 1 yard in 3 tries, lmfao ...

[Phil]

Best catch by Kerse in the history of the Super Bowl followed by the worst play call. Followed still by the ugliest brawl.

 

Nobody should be happy or proud.

[Bbradley62]

and someone should tell Duron Harmon he's allowed to get his uniform dirty...

[cherdano]

Lol at Pete Carroll

And you guys thought McCarthy was bad?

 

Seattle should go for a RB in offseason, apparently they don't have anybody they can trust to go 1 yard in 3 tries, lmfao ...

The play clock was 26 seconds and they had one timeout left. They could never have run three more times.

[mgoetze]

Best catch by Kerse in the history of the Super Bowl followed by the worst play call. Followed still by the ugliest brawl.

 

Nobody should be happy or proud.

It was a great catch by Kearse but honestly Duron Harmon should have broken it up, I am indeed not proud of that. The brawl, though? Come on, you expect to be able to punch Gronk in the head with no retaliation? Not gonna happen, sorry.

 

The referees should definitely not be proud. It was clearly roughing the kicker (for a first down, rather than running into the kicker which was declined) and I'm pretty sure "setting a pick for Doug Baldwin" is not in the Back Judge's job description.

 

All in all I would still say it was a great win for the Patriots and well deserved!

[jjbrr]

The previous two SBs cost us about $1.25 million from kickoff returns, but I think we ended up on top this year. Feels good.

[chasetb]

The play clock was 26 seconds and they had one timeout left. They could never have run three more times.

That is true - IF you forget that Russell Wilson has plenty of mobility. Though, the announcer at the time said they had 2 timeouts, not one (I literally only watched the last 2 minutes).

 

Play 1 - run it with Lynch, timeout. Play 2 - fake run / bootleg pass. Play 3 - run again.

[cherdano]

Ok, I'll go and out myself as a defender of the worst playcall ever.

 

They had three plays to run with 26 seconds left, but only one timeout. So one of them had to be a pass. If you run on second down, then everyone knows that third-down has to be a pass (or else you won't get a 4th-down play off). On the other hand, if you throw an incomplete pass on second down, and run it in on 3rd down, then you have taken about 6 seconds more off the game clock - not irrelevant given NE has two timeouts and just needs to get a field goal.

 

Now look at a

vine of the actual play: Patriots are in man coverage. Lockette is faking a run outside, then cutting inside for the slant. Butler has to not buy on the fake, and then still cover a little more ground than Lockette to beat him to the spot, since he first has to stay deep enough to avoid the pick by Kearse/Revis. In fact, he only has a chance to do that because Revis blocks Kearse so effectively that they are a little more in the way of Lockette than in the way of Butler.

 

How often do you expect this to happen? Butler is an undrafted rookie who came in as a backup, and used to play Division II football in college... I mean, he didn't even know he should go down in the endzone after an interception at the goal line.

[cherdano]

Play 2 - fake run / bootleg pass.

That's a great "fake" run in an obvious passing situation.

[andrei]

1st and goal, Lynch was stopped at 1 yard line at around 1 minute mark, so there is time for 3 run plays if they wanted to.

 

If you think the play call was bad, wait till you read the explanations:

 

Offensive coordinator: "We were conscious of how much time was on the clock and we wanted to use it all"

Pete Carroll: "We were going to run the ball in to win the game, but not on that play"

 

So they wanted to eat up clock. How do you do that? By running a pass play, and not any pass play, but a inside slant into traffic. Brilliant.

 

 

How often do you expect this to happen? Butler is an undrafted rookie who came in as a backup, and used to play Division II football in college... I mean, he didn't even know he should go down in the endzone after an interception at the goal line.

 

How often do you expect to see a guy who was selling shoes at Footlocker a few months ago and who did not catch a pass in NFL before this game to have 100+ yards in the Super Bowl?

How often do you think Kearse will make the same catch again?

[kenberg]

Even I watched the superbowl and in fact I enjoyed it a great deal. A question occurred to me. It involves several players, not all of them known to me, so I will call them X, Y, etc.

 

X throws a pass, intended for Y. Z is there to deflect the pass, the ball B pops up in the air and Y and Z fall to the ground. Let's suppose there is another defender W who, by the time Y and Z are on the ground, is fairly close. He sees that Y is on his back, and he sees B descending in the direction of Y's arms. Is W 100% certain the play is not over? I thought it was over until I saw Z charge Y as Y got up. Sure, a whistle ends the play. but there is a lot going on. If W leaps at Y, landing on him and grabbing for the ball, there will be a substantial penalty if the whistle has blown.

 

Maybe this wasn't an issue. I at least thought the play was over, I had no idea the ball was still live. I have not seen re-runs, but was someone close enough so that if he was alert to the situation he could have downed or even intercepted that pass?

 

 

As to the brawl, I'm sorry that it happened and penalties should be assessed, but I am not all that outraged. The last two minutes or so were extraordinary and I think what happened is very human. It has to be decried and punished but until the game is played by people with angelic restraint I don't think of it as being at all beyond understanding.

 

Anyway, I thought that there was enormous talent on display and I enjoyed it.

 

 

As to the pass at the end, I plead ignorance. Ground games sometimes lead to fumbles and sometimes fail to score, passes get intercepted. Ground games often make the last short distance, and passes often work. I'll leave that be. I do think though that when the team with possession is right on their own goal line and centering the ball will take them behind the goal line, defensive players should be paricularly careful not to draw a penalty. I imagine that this has been explained to the player involved.

[mgoetze]

Mike Sando, ESPN.com @SandoESPN

 

#NFL teams this season threw 66 TD passes with 1 INT on passes from the 1-yard line. That 1 INT was ... well ... tonight.

 

Mike Sando, ESPN.com @SandoESPN

 

5th time since ‘01 a tm down 4-8 pts had 2nd/GL from 1 w/20-40 sec left and 1 timeout. 2 ran and fell short. 2 threw TDs. SEA threw INT.

 

---

 

By the way, after they almost got in on 1st down, I was seriously thinking to myself that Belichick should take a timeout and let them score so that he would have one minute and one timeout left to even it up with a field goal.

[mgoetze]

X throws a pass, intended for Y. Z is there to deflect the pass, the ball B pops up in the air and Y and Z fall to the ground. Let's suppose there is another defender W who, by the time Y and Z are on the ground, is fairly close. He sees that Y is on his back, and he sees B descending in the direction of Y's arms. Is W 100% certain the play is not over? I thought it was over until I saw Z charge Y as Y got up. Sure, a whistle ends the play. but there is a lot going on. If W leaps at Y, landing on him and grabbing for the ball, there will be a substantial penalty if the whistle has blown.

 

Maybe this wasn't an issue. I at least thought the play was over, I had no idea the ball was still live. I have not seen re-runs, but was someone close enough so that if he was alert to the situation he could have downed or even intercepted that pass?

Here's my solution:

 

X = Russell Wilson

Y = Jermaine Kearse

Z = Malcolm Butler

B = Fully inflated official Super Bowl game ball

W = Duron Harmon

 

I have never played football, especially not in front of a crowd of tens of thousands, so I cannot speak to the difficulty of discerning whether a whistle has blown or not. But I would add that Harmon had the additional aid of being able to see much better than the TV camera at the time that the ball had not actually hit the ground, and I'm sure once the party is over he will get an earful for jumping over the play like that instead of going for the ball.

[billw55]

I would call the Kearse catch the luckiest in a super bowl, not the best. Basically the pass was defended, then bounced around and landed where he could grab it.

 

Also, interesting to see how the safety coming across evaded the defenseless receiver. Ten years ago, he hits him instead, and the catch doesn't happen.

[andrei]

If you think an interception from 1-2 yards out never happened in SB before, you can watch Kurt Warner throwing one:

 

Pass play can go wrong if:

defense makes an amazing play and makes an interception (like last night)

QB makes a bad throw and gets intercepted (like last night, lol)

pass bounces from receiver hands and gets intercepted (it just happened twice for RW against Packers)

receiver catches the ball before goal line and fumbles it

 

Run play can go wrong if:

fumble at hand-off

running back fumbles the ball

 

Carroll tried to be too cute and got bitten. He was lucky with first half last play call and with Kearse catch and was pushing it.

 

Are there statistics for how often you have 3 tries to run the ball 1 yard and fail?

With Lynch running the ball?

 

edit: 2 weeks ago everybody was agreeing with Justin that you can't settle for field goals when you have the best passing QB. Now there are people defending decision to pass the ball when you have the best RB in the game. :P

[cherdano]

1st and goal, Lynch was stopped at 1 yard line at around 1 minute mark, so there is time for 3 run plays if they wanted to.

Ok, they could have hurried up and probably run it 3 times. But it's also easy to see why they didn't do it: if they succeed on 2nd down after hurrying up, they give NE the ball with 45-50 seconds left and two timeouts. NE scoring a touchdown or field goal with that much time left is much more likely than an interception on a 1-yard slant at the goal line.

 

Btw, I don't think the "bounce-and-interception" is likely at all given the man coverage.

 

I will give you this: I am not sure they actually planned to let 40 seconds tick off the clock and then run a pass play. They were expecting Belichick to call a timeout right away and then call a run play.

[billw55]

1st and goal, Lynch was stopped at 1 yard line at around 1 minute mark, so there is time for 3 run plays if they wanted to.

This is not entirely correct.

 

First note, Seattle has only one timeout left.

 

On 1st and goal from the 5 yard line, snap at 1:06, Lynch runs to the 1 yard line.

Seattle chooses not to use their timeout, instead allowing the clock to run.

Next play, 2nd and goal from the 1 yard line, snap at 0:26.

 

Clearly, Seattle could not run the ball three times. With 0:26 remaining and one timeout, they could afford to run and fail once. So, with three chances, they can run only once and must pass twice. They chose not to use the run first time. I cannot call that obviously wrong.

 

Perhaps they could call their last timeout immediately, leaving about 1:00 on the clock. I do not think that this would realistically give them two running plays though, and still get a third play off. To do that they would have to use a hurry up, which reduces effectiveness.

[andrei]

1st and goal, Lynch was stopped at 1 yard line at around 1 minute mark, so there is time for 3 run plays if they wanted to.

 

Seattle chooses not to use their timeout, instead allowing the clock to run.

 

They can run 2nd down at 0:40, if they are blocked run 3rd down at 0:15 and call a TO before the 4th down run. There was time if they wanted to.

 

Very true that if they go in with 0:35 on the clock and 2 timeouts they give NE a chance.

But defense (ya, I know, they got shredded in the 4th) and Lynch got them that far, why go away from it?

[Bbradley62]

Butler is an undrafted rookie who came in as a backup, and used to play Division II football in college... I mean, he didn't even know he should go down in the endzone after an interception at the goal line.

It appears to me that he caught the ball in front of the goal line then was pushed back into the endzone. If he (reasonably) wasn't sure as to whether this was the case, he shouldn't kneel. http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2015/2/1/7961433/russell-wilson-throws-game-ending-interception-to-malcolm-butler

 

On the other hand, Jeremy Lane was clearly in the endzone when he made his interception and would have been able to play the rest of the game if he had been smart enough to take a knee. http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/jeremy-lane-victimizes-tom-brady-with-early-int-but-hurt-on-play-235751596.html