Football Odds And Ends

I was stunned as I watched from my couch Sunday when Denver’s Mike Shanahan decided to go for two with 24 seconds remaining after his team scored a touchdown to pull within one point against San Diego. The Broncos ran the same play that yielded their touchdown and earned the one-point win.

I certainly give Shanahan credit for the “gutsiness” of his move. I’m left to wonder if it had something to do with what I think is his realization of an inane overtime system in the NFL where the team that wins the coin toss usually gets the victory in the game because the entire 15-minute overtime period isn’t used if a team scores and the first team that scores first wins, regardless of whether each received the ball in the overtime period.

So Shanahan pulled one of the surprise moves recently seen in sports. Maybe he felt as if he was playing with house money as his team had been given a gift call by the officials moments earlier when what was ruled an incomplete pass should actually have been a Denver fumble, thus giving San Diego the ball and their chance to win.

Shanahan says it was the feeling he had for his team at that point in the game and that it wasn’t necessarily the right call but just one he felt was right for that moment.

As football tends to be a game where a strategy that works becomes the new hot thing you wonder if you’ll suddenly see coaches “pull a Shanahan” in the future. He’s been in charge of the Broncos for a while and has the second-longest active tenure with a team among the league’s head coaches. One of his players was quoted by the website CBS Sportsline saying it was a move made by a coach who has good job security.

In fact, I think it was a move made by a coach who’s been on the job long enough that he’s secure in knowing when to go with a gut feeling instead of by the book.

On the college front, the new timing rules really haven’t had any points of controversy over the first few weeks of the season.

One thing I would like to see change is that in the final two minutes of a game, the play clock should return to being 25 seconds and not the 40 seconds they’ve moved to this year.

What’s essentially happened is that a team with a lead can begin taking a knee at the two minute mark basically rendering that part of the game as meaningless because the play clock begins at the end of the previous play.

Granted, when the opposing team takes a timeout, the play clock goes to 25 seconds coming off the timeout. But once those are exhausted, or if a team only has one left, it can really make for a pretty dull ritual to close out a game, especially if it’s close enough that the one trailing could take a shot at a tie or a win.