Bill Belichick Can’t Believe NFL Teams Suck At Clock Management

Bill Belichick Can’t Believe NFL Teams Suck At Clock Management

Bill Belichick can’t believe these NFL teams and their head coaches are so bad at clock management. I mean, he kinda has a point. These teams have been awful, especially the last few weeks of this NFL season, about managing the clock well. Bill Belichick was asked on the Pat McAfee show about these situations and this is what he had to say as provided by Twitter/X:

Here is the quote of what he said about the clock management in the NFL on the Pat McAfee Show:

“Yeah, I don’t know, it was kind of reminiscent of the Chicago game, where they had a timeout and ran out of time at the end of the game. It’s mystifying, and I don’t know what happened internally between the communication of the head coach, the quarterback, offensive coordinator, or maybe a game manager person that is involved.”

If he didn’t say Chicago, you can at least think of probably 3 more instances of just bad clock management by these NFL teams and their coaches. Belichick goes on to talk about his rule of thumb for timeouts and their uses if he has 3 within 2 minutes. You use the first one between the 2 minute warning and 1:00, the 2nd between 1:00 and 30 seconds, and the last one within the last 30 seconds of the game. He says it’s not absolute that is always when they are going to use them, but that’s his general rule of how to use timeouts.

But he’s right, just this week there have been 3 instances of horrible clock management by teams in the NFL. The Bears, the Falcons, and the Vikings. The Bears used one timeout with barely more than 2 minutes left because the Bears sent out the punt team on 4th down, down 3 with barely enough time left. Read that sentence again. The Bears converted on a key third down with a minute left on Seattle’s 40 and just let the clock roll, for what, I don’t know. The Bears did call another timeout…when the clock was already stopped after an incompletion, and then just never had a chance to use the last one for good use either. Just horrible, those valuable 20 seconds the Bears could have used right after a key third down conversion made all the difference. Nevermind that the Bears wasted a timeout to get their punt team off the field, but it opens up the playbook when you have a minute instead of 37 seconds.

The Falcons are not off the hook either. They got the ball at the end of the game with 40 seconds left on the clock with a tied game on their own 19-yard line. They completed a pass from Michael Penix Jr. to Darnell Mooney for 25 yards to get the ball to the Falcons 44-yard line. CALL TIMEOUT. Nope, they wasted 16 seconds trying to run a play without calling one of their 2 remaining timeouts. When Mooney was down, there was 33 seconds left, perfect time to call that timeout. Instead they ran a play with 17 seconds left. The Falcons got a DPI to get into field position for an attempt at a FG but nevertheless, kicker was short by a lot. Time was the Falcons most beatable enemy and they refused to handle that correctly.

The Vikings could have used their timeouts better at the end of the 1st half against the Packers as well. They got the ball to the Packers’ 49-yardline at 35 seconds and should have called a timeout there. Instead, they ran a play for only 5 yards and wasted 7 more seconds to run that play. After that play, Darnold was sacked and they had to call a timeout there. Eventually, they did get into FG range to use their final timeout, but hindsight is 20/20, you can’t say “Well, it’s a good thing they had that timeout to use for the sack.” That’s not the point, the point is to use the timeout correctly to have a better chance of scoring more points, much less a FG.

Maybe ole Bill gave these new head coaches more credit that they probably deserve. To a Hall of Fame coach like Bill Belichick, he must have thought every other NFL team just knows what to do within the last 2 minutes when it comes to clock management. It’s increasingly showing that they do not, it might even be more likely that only a select few are actually capable of clock management in the NFL.

If that is the case for the NFL, I’m sure Belichick is not worried about the College football scene except for a few programs in the nation when it comes to clock management.

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