Thank You for Not Coaching! Week 5 – The Triangle Blog – Grantland

Not sure how much easier it would’ve been to kick a field goal in said monsoon…

The Patriots kick a field goal on fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line down 10 points in the fourth quarter. This was a very similar decision to Mike Smith’s call from Week 4, when he took a field goal on fourth-and-1 from the 6-yard line against the Patriots that turned a 10-point game into a seven-point one. Here, Bill Belichick faced fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line against the Bengals, and he made the same call: kick a field goal and go down seven. Some of the facts regarding those two decisions are the same. Others affect the choices at hand. The biggest difference was that Belichick made his call with 6:30 left in the game, while Smith’s came with 3:00 left. With the extra time, Belichick’s team would theoretically have more time to move the ball down the field and produce the extra yardage it needed on the subsequent drive for the touchdown, which seems to make the early field goal a better option. On the other hand, if Smith went for it and failed last week down 10 points, his game was over. Belichick could have gone for it here, failed, and still had a shot at scoring on two more possessions to win the game. That’s a friendlier fallback plan in the case of failure. In a contest where yards and points were harder to come by, Belichick had to know that it would be harder to score a touchdown on any future possession than it would be from the 1-yard line, even with Cincinnati’s great defense. And, of course, going for it and succeeding on this possession was Belichick’s best shot at actually winning the game over the next two drives; a field goal and a touchdown would only take him and the Patriots to overtime. What he might not have known is that the skies were about to open up. New England kicked the field goal and eventually got the ball back on Cincinnati’s 44-yard line after a fumble with 3:26 left, but by then, monsoon-like conditions had taken over in Cincinnati. The weather was so bad that Tom Brady completed only one of his nine subsequent passes the rest of the way, and the Patriots never seriously threatened to tie. I can’t fault Belichick for failing to prepare for the incoming storm, but his conservative call to kick from the 1-yard line really hurt his team’s chances of winning the game in any weather.