I initially read it the same way you did, but I think he means that they didn’t want to give Tom Brady the ball at the back end – i.e., score, recover the onside kick, and then leave Brady with as little time as possible after that. Not that I think it’s ever a good decision to run off time when you’re down by two scores, but maybe it makes his comments a touch less stupid.
Any plan that voluntarily puts you in the position of having to recover an onside kick is a very, very stupid plan.
I think the idea was that the chance of stopping the Patriots from scoring again was lower that the change of recovering an onside kick.
This is exactly what Reid was thinking, and of course it is clearly insanity. The chances of recovering an onside kick when the other team expects it is roughly 20%. In that particular game, the Patriots had 8 meaningful possessions, and punted on 3 of them, or roughly 37%. If you look at the entire season, the Patriots (the most efficient scoring team in football) failed to score on 57% of their drives.
But with more time, you’ve still got an out even if you don’t recover the onside kick. If there were 3 minutes left, try the onside, if the Pats recover, stop them, and you’ve still got time to score again. As it was, not recovering the kick meant they had to spend all their timeouts, and even if the Pats had gone 3 and out they would have had 40ish seconds left.
If the Chiefs really hustled, they could have kicked the ball straight to the Pats via normal kickoff. There could have been so much time left that the Chiefs could have allowed more than one first down, and still not be in a situation where Brady takes a knee.
Score quickly and preserve your time outs and the 2-minute warning means you can give up SEVERAL first downs before you eventually stuff the Pats and force a punt.
This wasn’t a situation where the Chiefs were hoping they could stuff the Pats in three downs or lose. No… there was so much time on the clock, with all time outs and the 2-minute warning.
Kick the ball to the Pats, leverage your time outs and the 2-minute warning and you have multiple opps to stuff them and force a punt. There should have been significant time and stoppages to make this a very, very practical approach.
THAT is how much time was squandered. They squandered so much that the on-side kick – an act of desperation – was all they planned on.
I watched Andy Reid for all his years as a head coach. He is a slow, methodical thinker and planner. It’s his strength and weakness. He is incapable of thinking and moving faster, and incapable of recognizing the time management and football strategy on the fly under such pressure.
He is horrendous and dangerous in all critical time management situations. It’s a record so bad, that it’s laughable to see anyone defend it.
PERIOD.
I suppose it is a good time to revisit this 5-year-old thread… same story, different year…
If anyone is claiming I am merely kicking a fan-base while they are down, I experienced the same 5-year lag, giving me 10 years of anti-Reid sentiment
I’m not a KC fan, but I’ve watched Reid since he became coach in the late 1990s. He’s probably in a lot of ways the modern version of Marty Schottenheimer. In many ways, he’s the kind of coach that many teams dream of - he’s great for teams that are bad and want to be competitive, and good for teams that are mediocre and want to be really good. He organizes well. He prepares well. He’s pretty much going to get most teams with good talent a playoff berth.
But in the playoffs, the margin for error is slim. The teams are mostly even in terms of talent. What Bill Belichick has proven year-in and year-out is that the difference between winning a championship and staying at home and watching the rest of the playoffs on TV is making in-game adjustments. I don’t question Reid’s pre-game preparation. But I question his ability (relative to other good coaches in the league) to adjust and adapt to the dynamics of the game. I think all of this is underscored not just by Reid’s post-season record, but rather in how he loses games. Reid rarely gets blown out by his opposition. When he was with the Eagles, they were usually competitive even in defeat. The same is true with his tenure with the Chiefs. His teams usually lose down the stretch. Failure to execute in key moments in the 3rd and 4th quarter. Obviously Reid can’t catch the passes that his players dropped - and they probably would have defeated Tennessee had it not been for some of those mistakes. But honestly, they were a better team coming into the playoffs than the Titans and probably should have won without too much stress in the final moments. Instead, the 4th quarter was just like a slow-moving disaster. You could see the coaching staff struggling, searching for answers with each Mariota pass and each Henry run. Reid usually has a good game plan, but once the opposing staff figures it out, he usually has no answer.
I am a lifelong Chiefs fan. After almost a decade of mostly-mediocre seasons under Herm Edwards, Todd Haley, and Romeo Crennel, I was happy when KC hired Reid. And, for the most part, he has produced…Chiefs have been in the playoffs 4 out of the 5 seasons that Reid has been the head coach.
But you hit the nail on the head here:
And here:
There was no excuse for the Chiefs losing to the Titans yesterday, particularly when they held a 21-3 lead after dominating the first half. And now, with the young talent on the Chiefs squad, it probably is time to look elsewhere for a head coach in Kansas City.
(snippety-snip)
Are you kidding me? The Chiefs are loaded with talent at the skill positions. Hunt, Hill, Smith, and Kelce can carry them with no trouble at all.
(Disclaimer: not a Chiefs fan, but a serious watcher of football.)
You might not have noticed (easy to do, since every Andy Reid season seems to end the same), but you’re quoting a comment from five years ago. That team had starters like Matt Cassell, Jamaal Charles, and Steve Breaston - not the four guys you mention.
Cassel was a lifetime backup until Brady went down and he had a good year with an always-solid Pats team. Jamaal Charles is a generational talent on par with Adrian Peterson, but can’t seem to overcome the injury bug and won’t ever get the rock anymore like AP did. Breaston is and was a nobody, and would look like a slug if he ever tried to compete with Tyreek Hill. The current guys look to have a bright future, unlike the ones you mention, except possibly for Alex Smith. Who knows what Reid will decide about the QB position.
NFL.com was reporting earlier today that the Chiefs were exploring the possibility of trading Smith. Pat Mahomes will probably be the starter next year. We Chiefs fans are cautiously optimistic about his future. He looked good in the preseason and in the final regular-season game.
Maybe a little off on a tangent but wanted to chime in again about Alex Smith.
Smith didn’t lose the game yesterday. He played a great first half, and he had considerably fewer opportunities to throw in the 2nd half. One idiot on NBC Sports threw up the stat sheet and suggested that he had a bad second half, yet he only threw 10 passes, 5 of which were complete and probably 2 or 3 more would have been complete had his receivers held on to the ball.
Alex Smith has, his entire career, been underrated not only by fans of his teams but by his own coaching staff. Jim Harbaugh was convinced that Colin Kaepernick was the future of the 49ers and used an injury as an excuse to bench him in 2012 - and we’ve seen how epically that backfired. A cautionary tale for Chiefs fans who think that the solution to their playoff drought is another QB. Honestly, I don’t think they can get much better than Smith - Tom Brady or Drew Brees he is not, but who is?
I think it’d be a serious mistake to trade Alex Smith, assuming they have the cap space to hold on to him (and I was one of the vociferous ones saying he sucked in his Niner days). Let Mahomes develop with a seasoned veteran starting ahead of him. In no way is Smith the cause of the loss or a problem in the locker room.
Man, this is so déjà vu. I came into this thread excited to make my opinion known, and see that I was the first respondent 5 years ago.
This year was difficult to watch. Even when the Griefs were alone at 5-0, I thought they were not as good as people thought they were. Personally, I thought that they didn’t so much as win those first 5 games as it was that they happened to be ahead when the clock ran out. In the first game, I thought that the only way you can count Tom Brady and the Cheatriots out of it is about 20 seconds after the final whistle blows to end the second half. Yes, we won, but we looked ugly doing it.
And then for the next 4 games, we looked ugly, even though we won. Yeah, sure, the W/L column doesn’t rank the Ws by how good they looked. A W is a W is a W. But, I think we legitimately deserved to lose a few of those games and just squeaked out the win.
We’ve all seen teams just completely dominate from the start to the finish. The Griefs didn’t do that in any game this year.
A popular sentiment was that we were completely on fire in the 4th quarter, but I know we lost a few games simply because we were only blowing smoke in the 4th. That abomination during the wildcard weekend was just the latest example of believing in – but not living up to – the hype.
Now, this isn’t really answering the question about Andy Reid. I think he showed some flashes of genius, but it wasn’t very stable. 
I’m with the crowd who thinks that Bob Sutton should be shown the door. For evidence, I present the game against Pittsburgh (Week 6, I think). By the end of the 1st quarter, we should have figured out that whenever the running back received a handoff, he was going to pause for about a second, and then tear it up the middle. By the 2nd quarter, it should have been obvious. But, the Griefs’ D couldn’t figure it out, and they ran the ball with impunity … Every. Freaking. Time!
And don’t get me started on Marcus Peters. I think he believes that he gets an extra $20,000 grand per game if they don’t have to wash the grass stains off his uniform.
Alex Smith had a career year, that’s for sure, but I don’t think there is a way a guy can play that good starting way late in his career. Yes, in the first game he had an amazing, long, down-the-field pass, which may have been the longest in his career at the time, or close to. In that respect, he must have been playing Rope-a-Dope for the first 14 years of his career. I don’t think he had ever thrown the ball that long, and then to unleash that monster was beautiful. And, yes, he did it a few more times in 2017, but the other teams soon caught on that he was going to do it at least twice a game. As Johnny Ace and asahi have said, he didn’t lose the playoff game, but I just don’t think he has it in him anymore. I truly think he started so hard at the beginning of the year because he knew that Mahomes had looked really good in the pre-season. Yes, Smith turned it up a notch right at the start, but I don’t think it is sustainable.
We’ve lost our Offensive Coordinator, so we will probably see some major changes on the offense. I liked what Smith did this year, but my guess is that the team has about $17,000,000 reasons to say goodbye to Alex, and he will be gone soon so Mahomes will take over. Mahomes looked good in the last game.
So, back to Andy Reid. There were a few games when the ugly, ugly specter of Martyball raised its perfidious head.
I say give him one more year, but if we can’t start winning and look like we mean it, then something will have to change.
Just figured I’d post this again because Bill Belichick’s understudy, Nick Saban, proved this true on Monday night. Granted, it was the college football championship and not the Super Bowl, but I think it still applies. Saban saw what Kirby Smart and the Bulldogs were doing. He recognized that his star QB was not capable of playing well when contained in the pocket. He knew his only chance was to spread the field and that to do that he needed a credible passing attack, and that his only chance was an untested freshman. It worked, just like Belichick was able to come back against the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl. That’s what winning coaches do. They figure out what’s working and what’s not, and they change during the game in real time.
When you have two teams that are evenly-matched, then coaching is what separates those who win and those who sit at home. As I mentioned before, among many things, coaching involves pre-game preparation, and I think Andy Reid is excellent in this area. Reid’s teams will usually (not always but, say, 75% of the time or more) defeat teams with less experienced coaching and less talented players. But in the playoffs, you’re going to play teams with experienced coaches, and you’re going to face better talent. It’s up to the players to execute, and it’s up to coaches to recognize what the opposition is doing in the 1st half and adjust to it. And it’s up to coaches to adjust to the adjustments that the opposition makes. From what I’ve seen, this is where Andy Reid gets beaten again and again. He doesn’t make in-game adjustments. Once teams figure out how to beat his game plan, he’s pretty much fucked.
I think basically a lot of this discussion can be boiled to to being risk averse (or not). Coaches like Marty Schottenheimer, Any Reid, Marvin Lewis, etc tend to try to conservatively preserve leads in the second halves of games rather than play to win by stepping on throats.
Reid doesn’t seem to like to make risky decisions (until he does, then they seem really stupid). My coach Marvin Lewis is exactly the same way. The team comes out on offense on a script in the first half, builds a significant lead, then lets it get frittered away in the second while wearing a deer in headlights look the entire time, wondering how it could have happened. I HATE that style of football. Go for the jugular, score as many points as you can.
Well said, both asahi and FoieGrasIsEvil. I have always thought that the “Prevent Defense” is just a means of preventing you from winning.
The rest of your post is fantastic, but I have a comment on this one. That is how Le’Veon Bell runs. It’s how he has run since he was drafted. Everyone knows that is how he runs. And he’s still topped 1200 yards on the ground and another 500 receiving every year but his rookie season and an injury-shortened campaign in 2015.