What a game. Everything is on this FG try.
…and KC wins by the skin of their teeth in the literal last second of OT.
The demise of the Colts was announced prematurely though. They’ve still got a lot in them. They have a chance against Houston next week.
Air temperature in Nashville for the Eagles-Titans game: 95F. Temperature on the artificial turf field: 157F. Numerous players complained about their cleats melting, and Eagles coach Nick Sirianni had to have an IV administered after the game due to the heat.
darnold? He’s on injured list
never mind
Indy made it a lot closer than it probably should have been. The loss hurts, but at least it wasn’t a blowout.
Indy coulda shoulda woulda won the game. Neither team played well on defense, but the Colts had a great chance to win in OT.
The sick thing is everybody knew the moment they definitively lost was when they did not go for that last 4th down. I did not think anybody in 2026 would be silly enough to give Mahomes the ball with 3 minutes left and only needing a field goal, but there you go. They were only in that position at all because they took some chances but then inexplicably took the foot off the gas.
Steichen’s excuse was he was only going to go for it if they got a favorable coverage, but that’s daft. Even if it was not a great chance, their best chance to win or at least tie was to go for it. All they ended up doing was extending the game a few more minutes only to still lose.
Oops, brain fart, meant Lock of course.
Everybody did NOT know they had lost when they didn’t go for it on 4th down. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and having Mahomes does not the Chiefs are guaranteed to score with 3 minutes left.
Very similar situation happened last season against the Broncos. The Broncos were 4th and 6 with 4:20 on the clock trailing 19-16. They kicked the field goal forced the chiefs to go 3 and out (the Chiefs also didn’t go for it and elected to punt, though it was 4th and 21). The Bronco’s then won the game by taking the ball to the KC 15 yard line with just enough time for a game winning FG.
I am sure there are plenty of other examples. I am not certain but I would expect in tyesterdays game next gen stats reckoned the FG was the correct decision.
To take the opposing side, 4th and 8 in a compressed field is very difficult to make, the Colts couldn’t get a man free on 3rd down and it would likely to be a similar story on 4th down. If they had gone for it on 4th down and not made it how many people would say “Everybody knew the game was lost the moment they decided to go for it”
At the least, I wouldn’t have said it.
I would have said the decision to go for a 4th and 8 and failing was the least bad option they had but still better than kicking the FG and hoping their defense held up.
Patriots get a valuable win in their home opener against former NFL QB and prominent conspiracy theorist Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, but they continue to look anemic on offense, and the injury bug is biting hard. They lost their best O-lineman in Mike Onwenu to a broken ankle, and both starting safeties had to leave the game - no word on those injuries yet. This on top of A.J. Brown being on Injured Reserve.
Drake Maye appears to be regressing - he played tentative and continues to be a turnover machine. I mean, he definitely looked better this game than his 2nd half meltdown last week, but the offense needs to take a big leap if they want a chance at beating either the Jags or Bills in the next two weeks.
It was 4th and 8 at the KC 15. If they went for it and converted the first down, they would probably win. If they went for it and didn’t make it, they would lose. No chance of a tie if they attempted a play on 4th down. (Unless they converted a field goal, of course.)
They ran Taylor twice, who had been tearing up the KC defense all night. Then tried a pass that ended up in a QB scramble. Took the foot off the gas? I disagree.
I think the Colts made the best decision they could on 4th and 8. Kick the field goal and rely on the defense. Trying to convert on 4th and 8 with barely any room would have been a desperation move; extremely low chance of success and an instant loss if they failed.
The problem wasn’t the decision, it was being in that position in the first place.
So here’s a question for the learned minds of the Dope.
Last night to start the OT, the Colts won the toss and elected to kick off. They held the Chiefs to a FG and thus had a chance to win with a touchdown, but could only manage a FG themselves. And, as has been discussed, they left enough time on the clock for Mahomes and company to drive down and kick a game-winning FG on the last play of OT.
Was the coin toss decision the correct call? I think so, especially after the Colts held the Chiefs to three points, and almost half of the overtime had expired at that point. BUT…the long pass and then the quick three plays after that meant that the Colts used up only two minutes of game time. And we all know what happened after that.
So, kick the ball to start OT, or receive the kickoff and start on offense?
Better to kick off, in my opinion. Let’s run through some possible outcomes:
advantage Colts advantage Colts advantage Colts advantage Chiefs advantage ChiefsObviously there isn’t consensus, because the two teams that have made this decision so far this season made opposite choices.
Jets’ Aaron Glenn on why he elected to receive: “Usually, if you can…really control the clock, you can control exactly how they’re going to play offense once you go and score. So, we control the clock, we go run it down; say we run it seven minutes, …it only gives them so much time to try to rebuttal.”
Colts’ Shane Steichen: “If we go first with it, Mahomes gets four downs going the other way, so we wanted to play defense there and know we had four downs to know what we gonna get.”
The Colts were right to kick the field goal. 4th and 8 isn’t easy to convert, and they would have been second-guessed and criticized even more harshly in hindsight had they gone for it and failed and the Chiefs won.
When you could win with a TD on your opening possession, receiving made sense. So much so that the team who won the coin toss and received had such a ridiculous advantage that the coin toss itself had too much importance. Hence the rules change.
Now it makes more sense to kick off, precisely because whoever goes second knows whether a TD will win or if it will just keep you alive. Or if even a FG will win assuming your opponent failed to score at all on their first possession. That info helps guide your game plan immensely. Whoever kicks off first gets an immense advantage.
The only way I could see an advantage in receiving is when a team can eat up the clock at will, like Seattle did yesterday and ate up more than 10 minutes on a single drive. (Remember that you only have 10 minutes in OT.) That could potentially give the kicking team literally no chance to respond. Call short passes and running plays to eat up the clock, let it count down to a few seconds left, then call time out and kick a FG.
Though to be real, if a team can do that at will you really aren’t going to have a chance in the first place. And it’s also unlikely that you’d go into OT when one side is already so dominant. So that’s an extremely unlikely situation.
The offence being able to run the clock could happen in a shoot-out style game where nearly every possession ends in a TD.
The other advantage of receiving first is if both teams do equally well on first possession the receiving team get first chance when it goes to sudden death, that is essentially how the Chiefs won last night.
Overall a think the advantages and disadvantaged of receiving pretty much balance each other out which is good because the game isn’t decided on a coin toss. Since the rule change the team receiving at the start of overtime have a record of 9/7/1 it is a small sample size but leans towards little advantage either way (if the chiefs had lost night night it would be completely even) @Railer13
I guess if you have two teams with spectacular offenses and putrid defenses and a game tied at something like 37-37, then whichever team goes first would grind down the other team’s defense and basically choke them out in OT. It’s possible. I just think it’s very unlikely.
True, but that “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The reason why the Chiefs won was because their defense was good enough to prevent the Colts from doing more than scoring a field goal, and their offense was good enough to score in the 3 minutes they had left once they got a second possession. (Not to mention having a reliable field goal kicking unit.) It required being successful on all sides of the ball. If you have a team that complete, you are going to win most games. That’s every NFL franchise’s dream.
It requires the teams to be equally as successful as each other, (which given it went to OT isn’t that far fetched). The KC were more successful on offence they would have scored a TD on their first possession. If they were more successful on defence the Colts wouldn’t have got into field goal range.