I get it that they wanted to kick. But nobody’s asking who gets to decide which way the kick goes. Looks like the ref asked Jets and Pat thought it was his decision. I don’t know what the rule is.
The problem is the captain stated “we’ll kick to the west” (I think it was west)". But you can only choose whether or not you will kick, OR the direction you want to go, not both. So the ref had to accept the first thing he said, “we’ll kick.”
This is not the first time it’s happened in pro football. Back in the old AFL the first playoff game to go into overtime started in the same way with the captain stating “we’ll kick to the clock” and the ref only accepting “we’ll kick” as the order.
Interesting. So let me get this right: If you win the toss you can choose your end of the field and let the other team say who kicks? You get one thing to choose and the other team gets the remaining unchosen factor to decide?
I wonder why the guy didn’t know that before hand.
You really get to choose between three options when winning the coin toss; to receive, to kick, or to pick the side you’ll defend. At least with opening kickoffs you can also choose to defer, which means you can make your choice at the beginning of the second half instead.
You can’t choose both to kick and the direction you’ll go; you only get to pick one. In the AFL game mentioned previously there was a strong wind, making it advantageous to have the wind behind you in overtime. That’s when Abner Haynes of the Dallas Texans (I think that’s right) said “We’ll kick to the clock” when the Texans won the overtime coin toss - they wanted the wind at their backs, and assumed the other team would choose to receive once they picked a direction. Problem is, you can’t make that assumption and take two choices - if your first choice is “kick,” the other team gets to choose which end they want.
I imagine the guy from the Patriots knew that, after a moment’s reflection, anyway. If the direction you want to go is important, you make that choice, which means the other team decides whether to kick or receive.
So do you think he blew it, and they are maintaining the brave face for the public?
Every once in a while someone really screws it up at the beginning of the game and instead of choosing to defer their choice till the second half, they choose to kick. Then in the second half the other team chooses to receive, and gets the ball to start both halves.
I was under the impression that this is how it used to work and was why almost no one deferred but a few years ago they changed the rule to make your scenario not likely so teams started to defer more.
Belichick insists it was his plan all along, and you have to view his comments suspiciously. However, it looks like in the real world, the receiving team wins 50.7% of the time, which is hardly a major gaffe. The Patriots figured they had the defense to stop the Jets – they’d been doing it for the 4th quarter – and that Ryan Fitzpatrick has just been playing beyond his talent the past few games. But the defense didn’t do their job.
Isn’t that really two decisions, each with two options?
As I understand it, if you win the toss, you can choose to make one of two decisions: whether to kick or receive (one decision, two options to choose between), or which goal line to defend (also one decision, with two options to choose between).
So four options, altogether.
I can understand how the Pats’ confusion arose: the decision to choose to receive is so nearly automatic that the kicking team is practically always the team that gets to choose which goal to defend. So I can see how the (incorrect) assumption would almost be embedded in a football player’s brain that if you kick off, you get to choose which goal is yours.
Belichick is insisting that he was planning to kick anyway, for unnamed strategic reasons. It doesn’t really make any sense, though. The only real reason to do that is if you’ve got two teams who are having trouble scoring and the wind is so strong that it’s a major factor in the kicking game, both for the opening kickoff and for getting a field goal. It’s true that the Pats were not offensive juggernauts this game, but still, Brady’s always got a good shot at just scoring and winning on the spot. No idea how you can plan to not put the ball in his hands, especially when your D is down several key players.
There is just no rational reason to kickoff in Sudden Death OT. None. You may never get the ball back. I don’t care what the conditions are, you never kickoff. There’s no reason to allow a choice, the ref might as well say “Heads wins the toss, Heads will receive”.
This rule is stupid. The ref should specifically ask the coin toss winner “Do you want to kick or receive?”, and let the kicking team choose the direction.
Remember NFL overtime is no longer sudden death. You cannot win the game if you kick a field goal on the first possession in overtime. The other team gets a chance to either tie it back up or win with a touchdown. If you have a very strong defense and a weaker offense, it could be to your advantage to kick and hold them then have just enough offense to get into field goal range. A FG in the second possession does win the game if you’ve stopped the other team.
Patriots/Jets game aside-- the stats show it is essentially a coinflip that whoever receives the ball first wins. There is absolutely an advantage to having the second position, knowing whether or not a field goal alone will win it for you. The risk being of course that if the other team scores a touchdown, you lose. Conventional wisdom says don’t take that risk, but if there is a significant wind disadvantage, combined with a strong defense against a weak offense, I’d be willing to guess that could push the statistical likelihood of winning to a team that chooses to take the wind instead of the ball.
edit- didn’t see OldGuys response, so what he said, plus the bit about the wind
Yeah, and I realized that as I was writing it.
You win the toss, you can decide which end you want to defend, OR if you want to kick or receive. The other team gets the choice of what you didn’t take.
Here’s what I’ve gathered today: Belicheck intended to kick off in overtime all along, and told his captains that. He also mentioned that to the officiating crew. So when the Patriots won the toss, the referee asked Slater, “You want to kick?” because Belicheck had already told him that was his plan. Slater replied, “We want to kick, that way.”
Slater’s reaction (“Hey, we won. Don’t we get to choose?”) seems to show he got mixed up in the process of things - typically, the team that kicks off gets to decide which end to defend, because the OTHER team won the toss and elected to receive. When you choose to kick instead of receive, the other team gets to pick the direction they’ll go. Slater just got a bit confused with kicking-off-means-we-pick-the-direction … but apparently the direction wasn’t a big deal for Belicheck. He just wanted to kick.
With the NFL overtime rules, where a field goal on the first possession doesn’t win the game, it’s not necessarily so automatic to take the ball in overtime. If you think your defense is good enough to stop the other team and get the ball back in good field position, then you can get a win with any score (since the other team already had a possession). It didn’t happen to work out for the Patriots this time.
If the other side scores a touchdown you lose at any time in SD OT. You don’t want the other side to get the ball. Weak offense, strong defense, those things didn’t do much good in the previous hour of play. There would have to be a steady gale force wind blowing in one direction through the stadium to make any difference. You are crazy to turn the ball over for any reason in SD. Just look what happened last night.
I disagree that it’s that simple, or that it would need to be a ridiculously strong wind. It’s percentages: straight up, 50.7% of teams receiving the ball first win the game. That’s a coin flip. Factoring in a strong wind and nothing else can easily give you a +25 yard total swing (half extra range for you, half shorter range for opponent) for field goal success. Since winning is a coin flip whether you get the ball 1st or 2nd, a wind advantage should statistically lead to a higher win probability, more so than than receiving the ball first.
The probability models estimate a true win percentage of 53% for receiving teams and 46% for kicking teams (the remainder being ties). That a is a very significant difference.
The actual results since 2012 (which is when the current OT rules were adopted) for non-ties are 33 wins for the receiving team out 65 events, but that is a pretty small sample size.
I do not think it is a coin flip at all. The receiving team has the opportunity to win the game without the opposing offense taking the field. That alone is worth it if you have a competent offense.
Are there any stats on how many times the receiving team scored a touchdown on the first drive?
The sample since the rule change is too small. We know that the receiving team has a very good chance of scoring at least a field goal through the history SDOT. I can’t see the reasoning behind giving up a very high percentage field goal success on the hunch that you’ll make it up afterwards.
Is there any info out there (though guessing probably there isn’t) on how much going against a strong wind decreases likelihood of scoring vs how much going with a strong wind increases that likelihood? if going against wind decreases a team’s TD% by more than say 3%, and going with the wind increases scoring % by more than 3%, then I’d still bet taking the wind instead of the ball leads to a higher win%.