Another day, another coaching blunder keeps a lesser team from upsetting a member of the NFL elite.
On Thursday, it was Bears coach Matt Eberflus who squandered a chance to force overtime against the one-loss Lions. On Friday, Raiders coach Antonio Pierce mismanaged a chance to upend the two-time defending (and also one-loss) Chiefs.
The problems started for the Raiders when Pierce burned a timeout due to indecision with 2:21 to play. After sending out the punt team while facing fourth and 11 from the Chiefs’ 40 and down by two points, Pierce changed his mind. So he called timeout and opted for a 58-yard field goal attempt from Daniel Carlson. The kick was no good.
To their credit, the Raiders forced the Chiefs to punt. Las Vegas got the ball back at their eight yard line with 1:56 left. And they moved the ball in position for another attempt to win the game.
Things went sideways when quarterback Aidan O’Connell completed a seven-yard pass to running back Ameer Abdullah. It put the ball at the K.C. 32.
Out of timeouts (thanks to the one they’d wasted), quarterback Aidan O’Connell hurried to the line and spiked the ball with 15 seconds to play.
That was the mistake that deprived the Raiders of the chance to win. They could have run the clock down to three or four seconds before the snap and the spike. That approach would have ensured that the Chiefs would have had no shot to get in position for a game-winning field-goal try of their own.
Then came the mistake that compounded the first one. Instead of trying a 50-yard field goal, the Raiders ran another play. The snap came early, O’Connell failed to catch it, and the Chiefs recovered. Game over.
After the game was over, Pierce explained the reasoning for the final, botched play.
“We was gonna snap the ball and really just throw the ball out of bounds and just — the ball’s at the 32 yard line. We were gonna kill four or five more seconds and kick a 49-yard field goal,” Pierce told reporters.
Later in the press conference, he was pressed again about that decision.
“Yeah, I answered that a minute ago,” Pierce said. “I was trying to just throw the ball away. . . . So we was gonna throw the ball away, waste four or five more seconds, and kick a field goal.”
The explanation makes no sense. They could have wasted as many seconds as they wanted before O’Connell clocked the ball on the prior play.
It’s another failure of situational football. In the moments after Abdullah was tackled at the 32 with a ticking clock, O’Connell needed to know that the strategy in that moment was to use as much of the clock as possible, so that Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes wouldn’t have a chance to do Mahomes things.
After the ball was spiked, the Raiders decided to shrink Mahomes’s window by burning four or five more seconds. And look at what happened.
While different from the fiasco at the end of the Bears-Lions game, there’s a common thread. Coaches and players need to be ready for every situation. They need to think clearly and decisively when it comes to clock management.
The last play, which became the decisive turnover, wasn’t necessary if O’Connell had the presence of mind to line up on the ball, milk the clock, and spike it with just enough time to try the field goal. That’s on Pierce, frankly, for not having O’Connell ready to do what needed to be done in the most important moment of the game.