As the coach of the Baltimore Ravens, Brian Billick would devote part of his Friday practices to play-calling oddities. If the moment called for an intentional safety or a hurried field-goal try while the final seconds of a half ticked off, he wanted his players to feel prepared — and they were, he said.
The harder part, he discovered during his first season, was gaining comfort in those situations himself.
Even after 20 years of coaching in college and the NFL before being hired by Baltimore in 1999, Billick realized he was somewhat of a novice in a critical aspect of his trade: game management.
“That’s one of those nuances of the job that you’re not fully aware of until you take the job,” said Billick, now an analyst for NFL Network. “For me, personally, I probably wasn’t as prepared as I probably needed to be.”
That is perhaps because no definitive literature on the subject exists, no manual for coaches to pore over that delineates how to proceed in every conceivable circumstance that arises during the course of a game. After reading that there are about a billion late-game scenarios, Billick said, he once quipped to his staff, “I only know half a billion.”
The one constant in this morass is that game management, and all that it entails, seems to mystify coaches every week, regardless of their pedigree. No one is immune from scrutiny or gaffes. Not Super Bowl winners like Tom Coughlin and Pete Carroll, and not rookies like Todd Bowles, who after each of the New York Jets’ past four games has been asked to explain the methodology behind decisions that backfired.
“You try to make a rational decision and you go forward,” Bowles said recently.
He added: “They’re mistakes if they don’t work. You’re a genius if they do work. The ones that worked were good, the ones that don’t, I don’t look at them as mistakes. You look at them as learning experiences.”
Those experiences have piled atop one another, as the Jets have dropped from 4-1 to 5-5 after a loss to the Texans, whose second-year coach, Bill O’Brien, spent five seasons observing Bill Belichick in New England. Belichick is considered a master of a game management, which has become ever more indicative of a team’s success. According to the NFL, 76 games through Week 10 have been decided by seven or fewer points, the most in any season at that stage.
In Billick’s first season, when the Ravens went 8-8, they lost four games by a field goal. Though he could not recall specific instances, he said he made his share of mistakes.
To refine his instincts, Billick would record games and watch only the final few minutes of each half. He did so with two objectives in mind: anticipating his counterparts’ decisions while trying to understand their reasoning. If he knew the coaches well enough, he would call them later and probe: Why did you use your timeout then? Why did you go for it on fourth down? Why did you run then instead of pass?
O’Brien, who worked two years at Penn State before taking over the Texans, said that he “constantly” thought about different situations. He works through them in meeting rooms with his staff and on the practice field, where earlier this season, he said, the Texans simulated the play — an interception at the goal line — that secured the Patriots’ most recent Super Bowl title. The exercise was as much for him as his players.
“To me, the way you really work at clock management is to put yourself in different scenarios every single day,” O’Brien said in a teleconference last Wednesday.
Starting out in Tampa Bay, Tony Dungy considered this approach helpful: Whenever he could watch a game, be it in college or the NFL, he sought to “put myself in the moment” and envision how he would react in the same situation.
As a player and a young assistant, Dungy learned from legendary Steelers coach Chuck Noll, who espoused the importance of playing what he called “ahead football” — not stopping the clock, snapping the ball late, keeping the opponent in bounds. But Dungy’s most valuable training came during the four seasons he served as the Vikings’ defensive coordinator under Dennis Green.
Knowing that Dungy expected to become a head coach someday, Green helped prepare him. The day after games, win or lose, Dungy would ask Green to explain his thinking at pivotal times.
“So much, especially when you get to the games you’re going to have to win against good teams, they’re going to come down to one score,” said Dungy, now a studio analyst for NBC. “It’s not necessarily clock management in the last minute or the last 30 seconds, which everybody sees. But oftentimes it happens along the way, and maybe in the third quarter, fourth quarter.”
To maintain clarity in those moments, Dungy vowed early on that he would not call plays. He did not want those responsibilities, which demand a singular focus, to interfere with his ability to recognize, say, when to call a timeout, to start bleeding seconds off the clock, or to score — and if so, field goal or touchdown? — so as to avoid leaving too much time for the opposition to counter.
“That’s what I got paid to do when I became the head coach,” Dungy said. “To manage those situations and make those decisions.”
Those coaches who do call plays on offense or defense tend to have assistants or staff members in the booth equipped with charts that offer guidelines on how to run out the clock.
Even in a profession of micromanaging, this is a common practice. Ernie Adams, the Patriots’ director of football research, is often credited with aiding Belichick. Bowles, who shares defensive play-calling duties with coordinator Kacy Rodgers, depends on outside linebackers coach Mark Collins to advise him during games. Earlier this season, Bowles said he chose him because Collins was “calm” and “levelheaded.”
“At the end of the day,” Bowles said, “I have to go with what I feel like.”
It will probably take time for Bowles to refine his tactics, just as it did for former Pittsburgh coach Bill Cowher, who came to develop a strict strategy pertaining to the use of timeouts.
He preferred saving them until the final minute of each half. He ordered his players not to call one after halftime unless they checked with him. And inside a minute remaining in each half, he would call a timeout after any offensive play longer than 15 yards.
If the Steelers led by at least 11 points after halftime, Cowher would direct them to leave the huddle with 15 seconds left on the play clock but not snap the ball until 5 or fewer remained. Pittsburgh went 113-1-1 in those circumstances under Cowher, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
“You’ve created an advantage for yourself,” said Cowher, now an analyst for CBS, “so use that advantage.”
Bowles would love an opportunity to exploit that advantage. During their past four games, the Jets have held an 11-point lead after halftime only once, in their 28-23 victory against Jacksonville on Nov. 8.
With 90 seconds left in the first half that day and the ball at the Jets’ 15-yard line, and possessing all three timeouts, Bowles hoped to gain enough yardage on a first-down running play, he said later, that would allow them to throw downfield. When that did not happen, rather than attempt passes that could end up stopping the clock, the Jets ran on the next two plays, forcing the Jaguars to use two timeouts before getting the ball back with 25 seconds left.
However sound Bowles’ analysis was, the Jaguars’ touchdown two plays later neutralized it.
It was those types of moments, Billick said, that helped him mature: “You have to be comfortable knowing that you can make all the right decisions at all the right times and still be wrong, or else you drive yourself nuts.”
Billick seemed to adjust fine. In his second season, Baltimore won the Super Bowl.
