An inquiry concerning human understanding

Two incidents from yesterday’s NFL action:

(1) Detroit is punting from their own five in a tie game with Minnesota. The clock is running and Minnesota has no time outs. If Detroit calls a time out right before the play clock expires they will punt with 20 seconds remaining. Instead, they snap the ball with 26 seconds left, essentially giving Minnesota one precious extra play to get into field goal range (Luckily for the Lions some roided up Viking committed a personal foul on the play, probably saving the game and allowing the William Clay Ford ownership era to continue to move in the right direction after a bit of a slow start).

(2) Tennessee is up by three with a first down at their own 38 with 1:40 to go. Denver has one time out which means that if Denver stops the Titans they’ll be forced to punt with about 10-15 seconds left. On first down the Titans gain a yard. On the play they’re flagged for illegal procedure. Denver accepts the penalty rather than declining it, meaning that it’s first down again, thus allowing Tennessee to run out the clock without getting a first down (for extra added incompetence the Titans don’t realize this and run the ball twice, tempting the ghost of Joe Pisarck before realizing they can just kneel).

What you have here is gross clock mismanagement by coaches who collectively are paid millions of dollars to win football games. Any halfway alert fan who knows the rules — and these aren’t unusual or otherwise complex situations — would do a much better job of making these decisions.

There are a couple of explanations for this. The first is that football coaches are idiots but nevertheless a multi-billion dollar industry hires idiots to make key decisions. Now it’s not if there’s nothing to this (see Matt Millen’s brilliant career as an NFL general manager). Still in my view that’s far too simplistic an explanation. NFL coaching staffs have to manage complex operations that involve making hundreds of decisions every week — and dozens during every game — operations which require various kinds of intelligence (strategic, psychological, analytic, emotional etc) to pull off successfully. It seems implausible that coaches make these kinds of simple mistakes — and they make them all the time — because they’re simply dumb people in general.

Rather I think a more plausible explanation is that it’s extremely rare to find all the cognitive skill sets and relevant related experience that one would want a football coach to have in one person. Earlier this month on a flight to Detroit I ended up sitting to a great Michigan football player from the 1970s. He told me several stories about the team’s coach at that time, Bo Schembechler. Most revolved around Schembechler’s gift for inspiring players to believe in their abilities. “Bo,” he told me, “could make you believe that you could have won the Vietnam war single-handedly with a BB gun.” That of course is a much rarer skill than being good at clock management (which Schembechler was almost comically bad at).

Still it does make me wonder why big time football teams don’t employ some geeky kid — heck I would have done it for free for Bo in my younger and more vulnerable years — to just tell the head coach what to do about the clock as he’s busy trying to manage 17 other tasks while getting a bunch of guys to run through the metaphorical equivalent of a brick wall. And this applies to a lot of things in life besides football as well, like political leadership: expecting an inspiring politician to also be some sort of policy polymath is probably unrealistic (not that this is an argument for Peggy Noonan-style Odes to the Virtue of Stupidity, but still).