When Bill Belichick observed recent Falcons and Bears losses in which clock management errors were a major factor, it led him to put on his coaching hat and think about how to avoid such errors. And during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show he gave a lengthy explanation of his thinking in these late-match situations.
“It’s mystifying,” Belichick said. “What I’ve always tried to do is you have three timeouts in a two-minute situation. You use your first timeout between two minutes and one minute, you use your second timeout between one minute and 30 seconds, then you use your third timeout less than 30 seconds This wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but it was a rule of thumb You didn’t want to have two timeouts within 20 seconds. the end, and you didn’t want to use two delays waiting in the first 30 seconds of a two minute situation where you didn’t need it.”
That lines up with what Tom Brady said about using timeouts during Fox’s broadcast of Sunday’s Packers-Vikings game, and Belichick said Brady helped shape his thinking about timing. ‘use downtime.
“Tom, me and Josh (McDaniels) had this conversation, probably around 2013, 2014, somewhere in there,” Belichick said. “Because I always wanted to save it for last, especially if you needed a field goal, so you didn’t have to lead the field goal team without a huddle, you could just take a timeout and go for it and But Brady said: “I’d rather have more time and less downtime because it gives me more options, rather than less time and downtime. So let me take care of it, that’s my business.” fault and you can do it » remove it from. me, but I’d rather you take the 27 second timeout and give me more time to do something, rather than flip a 27 second coin, and now we go to 13 seconds and a timeout, I prefers to have 27 seconds and no timeout greater than 12 seconds and a timeout.'”
Belichick said every coach in the league should be aware of other teams’ clock management mistakes and use them to teach his players. Belichick said Falcons coach Raheem Morris should have seen the Bears botch the end of their Thanksgiving loss to the Lions and should have looked into that situation with his own team before the Falcons made similar mistakes. timeout errors in their loss to the Commanders.
“Atlanta, they should have watched the Chicago game,” Belichick said. “Even if they weren’t involved in the Chicago game, they should have looked at this. Every team in the league should have looked at this. They should have said, ‘If we were in this situation, what would we do ?’ At what point would the head coach say, “We need to take a timeout,” or the quarterback, or whoever, and when you see things like that happen, it’s a great example. Another one if I was a head coach, whatever team I was on, I would look at this with my team, and then I would talk about it with my team and say, “Here’s what we’re doing here. , here’s what we would do, here’s the type of game we would do. would organize, here’s when we would and play both sides, because you can be on offense or defense.
Belichick said he attended a meeting at the University of Washington, where his son was defensive coordinator last season, and listened to head coach Jedd Fisch go over all the details of the victory in overtime of the Falcons against the Buccaneers.
“One of the most interesting games was the overtime game between Atlanta and the Bucs,” Belichick said. “It was the weekend I was in Washington, and Jedd Fisch showed it to his team, and he was going back and forth saying, ‘Here’s the Bucs and here’s Atlanta.’ It was about a half hour meeting with his team, and Jedd explained in detail it was a great meeting, one of the best I’ve ever seen, on how the team should proceed: “We would do this in this situation. . Look at this player making this decision here. We wouldn’t want to make this decision, otherwise we would make this decision. And the game went back and forth. ends up catching the pass is the guy special teams who never even plays offense, (KhaDarel) Hodge, being ready to go out there, get in there and take advantage of that opportunity and win the game.
Belichick said that during his coaching tenure, they would always talk the day before the game about these late-game situations, often after just watching college games where these situations occurred.
“The Saturday morning meeting was always more about situations,” Belichick said. “How to deal with different time situations, or personnel, or substitutions, or rules or whatever… One of the best feelings I ever had as a coach would be when we were good in New -England, and I’d walk into this Saturday night meeting, and the guys would all be sitting around having dinner, and the matches would be on, and they’d all be talking about – watch out for that, they’re going to do a. tough count here, they made a bad play here, we don’t would never do that, and they would talk about situational football.
Belichick said many of his greatest players were so attentive to football that they would never watch a game as a fan, but would always watch a game and engage with it intellectually.
“They just couldn’t watch a game, they would have to talk strategy and play calls and timeouts,” Belichick said.
This is what every coach and player needs to think about, to avoid embarrassing losses like the Bears and Falcons.
