But here’s the thing: that wasn’t the ‘smart’ thing to do either. It’s not ‘smart’ to allow a receiver with Diggs’ athletic ability to just catch the ball – remember that a receiver can catch the ball, spin around and then he’s home free into the end zone. There’s no NFL DB - not a damn one in the league - who’s thinking “Oh shit, I’m early, I’m going to let him come in bound with the ball and then knock him out of bounds.” It doesn’t work like that. Not because he’s some robot that isn’t trained that way, but because he knows that one spin, or one stiff arm, and he is going full-on Jerry Rice for the end zone. An NFL DB never, ever, ever assumes that he can allow his WR to catch the ball first. Ever. Not to say that you won’t find tape of DBs doing that but it’s not the smart play.
I guarantee you that the smart play from the DB’s point of view and from Sean Payton’s point of view was to simply time the coverage right and get the hit in the split second before he caught the ball. You play the percentages.
The best analogy that comes to mind is a baseball analogy. You have an outfielder that plays deep, near the fence, thinking that he’s facing a power hitter and that his job is to protect against a sacrifice RBI. He’s gone two runners in scoring position to think about. But instead of being a deep ball, he gets a low line drive in front of him. He thinks he’s got a chance for the third out and prevents the tying run. Instead he dives for it and misses it completely. Both runs score. They lose the game. Should he have allowed the ball to just drop? Perhaps that could be argued, but he’s thinking he has a chance to end the game. And that’s what he’s trained to do as an outfielder. And that’s what he’s done many times before. Instead, though, this one time, he played deep, got to the ball late, and let the bases clear.
Rule 8 Article 3 Item 6. Carried Out of Bounds. If a player, who is in possession of the ball, is held up and carried out of bounds by an opponent before both feet or any part of his body other than his hands touches the ground inbounds, it is a completed or intercepted pass. It is not necessary for the player to maintain control of the ball when he lands out of bounds.
Seems like he gets both feet “down-by-contact”, as it were.
Letting the receiver catch the ball, and then tackling him, does involve some risk. There’s a chance that you’ll miss the tackle and give up a touchdown. But trying to prevent the catch has risks, too. Maybe you’ll get a pass interference penalty. Maybe you’ll mistime the hit and give up a touchdown anyway. You seem to be saying that trying one strategy and failing is worse than trying another and succeeding, which isn’t terribly illuminating.
Besides which, I’m not saying that a defender should begin the play with that as his goal. I think a smart player knows the situation and what his team’s priorities are. And when you can’t be certain of Plan A (breaking up the pass), then a good Plan B is to make sure the receiver stays in front of you, especially when you know you’re the last line of defense.
Since we have gone all tangential, a scenario just popped into my head: I have gone deep-ish on a timed out route, dancing along the very edge of the hash marks, my feet inches from the edge; a corner has picked me up and is a step behind; I turn and make the catch, forcing the cornerback to pull up to avoid the DPI; his foot lands in the white, but his momentum carries him into me, knocking me down. Now, he is technically OoB at contact, so can I get up and run, since he has not legally touched me?
That makes a certain amount of sense. How about if the defender just hits the receiver and directs him out-of-bounds, rather than obviously carrying him? Does it ever become a judgment call for the official, or does any contact near the sideline automatically give the benefit of the doubt to the receiver?
Look, I don’t think anyone here defending Williams would deny that he fucked up royally. We’re just saying that at game speed with all the various considerations (possible PI, keep Diggs inbounds, etc) his whiffed attempt at a cut tackle is a somewhat understandable fuckup and not the ohmygodhowisheevenintheleague fuckup that initially looks like.
From what I can tell, the receiver is responsible for getting his feet in. If contact by a defender makes one foot go into the white, the receiver has failed to properly complete the catch, as long as the defender is not bearing the receiver out. A defender can slam into the (non-defenseless) receiver and cause an important foot to land in the white, resulting in an incompletion.
An understandable fuckup, I can go along with that.
So what is there for Williams, and every other defender in the league, to learn from this? How do the coaches and players train themselves so they don’t let it happen again?
(Of course, all the training and practice in the world can’t prevent every fuckup. Sometimes you do everything you can think of to prevent something from happening, and it happens anyway.)
How do they train themselves? They don’t. They can’t, other than live and learn.
It’s an “in-betweener”.
There are so many variables that the DB is processing instantaneously on a play this close, e.g.:
height of ball where it will likely be caught
speed of the thrown ball
my (or, the DB’s) speed and abolity to get to the ball and / or receiver
the angle defined by the path of the ball and the path I have to take to get to the point of reception
the likelihood of my ability to make a play on the ball
the likelihood of my ability to make a play on the receiver
where’s the sideline, and can I use it to help me defend this pass?
how much time was on the clock when the ball was snapped, and how long did it take for this play to develop? How much time is left on the clock at this moment? Of course, I have to use my internal clock or count 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi …
am I the contain guy, or do I have help deep?
where are my other teammates, the ones who are in position to help with this play?
There’s probably more.
It’s an “in-betweener”, much like in baseball when a soft line drive is hit in front of an outfielder: can I catch this thing on the fly? Can I dive for this? Or do I slow down and play it off of the bounce, and give up on that out?
And regarding training and practice to avoid a fuck up, well there is positive training, training for something, to do something positive, and then there’s negative traing: avoid this, and don’t do that. It’s not as effective as positive training.
If the D never fucked up, games would end in scoreless ties all the time. It would be like soccer. The defense makes scores of mistakes throughout the season. Sometimes those mistakes happen at the precise moment in the post-season that you really want them not to. Like that epic Packers meltdown in Seattle a few years back. Makes the other team pretty happy, though.
I have it recorded and I watched that play again. What I wrote from post 103 to 150 was based on my memory of when it happened, and I didn’t replay it when it happened.
Having just watched it again from my DVR, I’ll say that Marcus Williams did screw the pooch. He was playing deep against Stefon Diggs.Williams could have timed it better, and easily so. I think he was so excited to come up and make a stop that he got there too soon and then ducked to not have a PI against him.
It was not an in-betweener, not at all. The rookie made a rookie mistake.
That’s not the best view of it. But tnetennba has a point. Consider this — when Julio Jones breaks right on his square out, he slips and falls. The defender stumbles on top of him. The push (what tnetennba calls a “body slam”, I call a push) happens next and it’s not seen well in that clip. When Jones tries to get up, the defender pushes him down. Not an intentional push, me thinks, but a tangle of bodies as they’re both trying to get up.
First, the ball had not been thrown yet, so it can’t be pass interference. Second, I don’t see how you can conclude that an unintentional “push”, when the guy you’re covering falls down right in front of your legs and you have no other choice to stay upright, is illegal. Third, defensive players are not required to suddenly stop their bodies in an instant when a receiver falls to the ground so the defender can avoid an imagined penalty. Fourth, the uproar that would have occurred if the refs had somehow decided that falling down and getting caught up with a defender’s legs should have been called a penalty on the most crucial play of the game, would have been monstrous. I think a vast majority of NFL fans prefer the games be decided by the players (even if they slip), rather than the refs on an imagined, highly questionable call.