But you are not taking into consideration the stats omenran posted above:
Brandon McManus career history on 62+ yard FGs
62 yards - 2016 - MISS
62 yards - 2018 - MISS
63 yards - 2021 - MISS
64 yards - 2019 - MISS
64 yards - 2022 - MISS*
70 yards - 2021 - MISS*tonight
So your first option is actually: “Kick a 64-yard field goal with a kicker who has never done that in a real game.”
They mortgaged their future to get Russel Wilson, but didn’t put the ball in his hands with the game on the line. From what I’m hearing from Denver, their fans are pissed.
Although you’re right, it’s easy to second guess. 64 yard field goals are very rare (I don’t have the statistics) and apparently even harder kicking that direction in Seattle (but the weather didn’t seem to be an issue last night). Gaining five yards or more on fourth down seems like a much better risk than a once in a career kick.
This, in a word, was bullshit. There were 15 seconds left after the missed FG. FIFTEEN SECONDS.
Rookie head coach should know better.
Who said anything about cut and dried?
But the probabilities are more or less known. Wilson historically has been ~50% or better on 4th and 5. And McManus has hit only one 60+ yard FG ever (from 61). Granted, Wilson is playing on a new team, antagonistic crowd, etc, but if I have to lose, I’d rather trust something close to a coin flip (followed by a 50+ yard FG attempt) than an almost certain miss.
From Yahoo Sports:
In 2021, NFL offenses went for it 47 times on 4th-and-5 and converted 23 of those attempts into first downs — a near 50 percent success rate. By contrast, only two NFL kickers have ever made field goals of 64 or more yards in a game, Matt Prater in Denver’s thin air in 2013 and Justin Tucker inside a domed stadium in Detroit last October.
Am I the only one who is entranced by GMF tuesday Angry Runs?
Frankly, only 2 kickers have ever kicked a 64+ yard field goal in a regular-season NFL game: Matt Prater (64 yards) and Justin Tucker (66 yards, last year).
Even for a kicker with a strong leg, a 60+ field goal is still a pretty low-percentage kick. This tweet says that, according to the NFL’s “Next Gen Stats” modeling, McManus had a 14% chance to make the kick at 64 yards. (Had it been at Mile High, with the thinner air, rather than at Lumen, essentially at sea level, the odds would been around 21%.)
Conversely, their stats suggest that the Broncos would have had a 42% chance of converting the 4th and 5.
Perhaps you’re the only one who knows what it is.
I had to google it. Is it available outside of twitter?
It was on twitter, but its Good Morning Football. Kyle Brandt does it and I live for it each week.
I found a page that says he’s 1-out-of-5 from over 60 yards, including last night. So he was 1-out-of-4 when the choice to kick was made; 25%.
If converting 4th-and-5 is 50%, and kicking the shorter field goal is also 50%, then doing both would be 25%.
In the real world, we can only guess at what the actual probabilities are.
Maybe no one is using those exact words, but it seems like people are treating the decision to kick as incontrovertibly, unquestionably wrong. I’m not saying it was right, just not blatantly wrong, either.
Was that his name? Seemed obnoxiously hyper, to me. “Fetch me my dart gun; I think I can bring him down from here.”
The analysis I’ve read in the game’s postmortem is that it seemed like a rookie head coach “froze” and made the bad call. It’s like he panicked and wasn’t sure what to do.
Makes sense. Putting your hopes on tying the NFL record for 2nd longest FG would probably not be the choice he made with a bit more time to think about it.
And that’s the thing. He called the timeout with about 2 seconds on the play clock and 20 seconds on the game clock. Which means that the previous play ended at about the 1:00 mark. Had he immediately called time out, and then converted the 4th down, they would have had plenty of time, and two time outs, to run several more plays to get in better position for the field goal.
If, instead, he still chose to kick the long field goal, the result is the same.
True, though that is, of course, a very small sample size. A few points:
Both of the above suggest to me that McManus’s likely success rate on that particular length of kick, at that stadium, was going to be substantially less than 25%.
I think it was the wrong call, for reasons stated in this thread. However, we should note that he made it on the “iced” attempt, and missed by only inches (he had the distance) on the one that counted.
No he didn’t, did he? I thought he missed the iced attempt as well.
One other thing involved to note about the decision is that if they go on 4th and 5 and fail, they’re giving up the ball with a minute left and three timeouts. Game’s not completely over at that point.
I didn’t have a great angle on it, but it looked good from my seat.
That depends on whether Denver calls a timeout before the 4th down play. Assuming (as you did) that Denver’s 4th-down attempt fails, Seattle has the ball with 1:00 on the clock and Denver has two timeouts, or ~0:45 on the clock and Denver has three timeouts.
It’s a complicated call, and maybe it was too much for a first-year coach. (I think Denver has a first-year coach, right?) One possibility is that he let the clock run, which kinda forced them into attempting the field goal, rather than decide to decide to kick and let the clock run on purpose.
Football does seem to have a great number of these sorts of strategic decisions. I can’t think of another sport that quite compares to that.
From the TV you could see he missed it pretty badly on the first kick, worse than the one that counted. My WAG is that he tried to correct on the second kick which is why it was closer.