What Were They Thinking: Chip Kelly should have let Washington score
What Were They Thinking is a weekly post that helps you relive the foolish decisions from the week in the NFL. Enjoy the insanity.
Chip Kelly refuses to let Redskins score
Chip Kelly is often praised for his outside the box thinking, but he played things very conservatively against the Washington Redskins on Saturday.
Teams don't do this often enough because it usually goes against every logical bone in a coach's body, but sometimes it makes a lot of sense to let the other team score.
Kelly had the perfect opportunity to do just that in the final two minutes against the Redskins. Washington drove down to the Philly 8-yard line with 1:09 to play in a 24-24 game and with the Eagles down to two timeouts. At this point, the Redskins could have worked the clock down to a few seconds and line up for a simple Kai Forbath chip-shot field goal.
In order to do this, Washington ran the ball three straight times from inside the 10, with the Eagles making the tackle at the end of every play. If they just let the Redskins score on the first attempt, there would have been close to a minute left for the Eagles to tie the game with a touchdown and force overtime. Not ideal, but better than the alternative.
That alternative saw the Redskins work the clock all the way down to 10 seconds with Forbath banging through an easy 26-yard field goal for the win. It derailed the Eagles playoff hopes in the process.
Colin Kaepernick runs out of bounds
The San Diego Chargers pulled off a huge comeback win Saturday night, and they were aided by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
San Francisco once led the contest by 21 points, but saw its lead trimmed to just seven with a little more than five minutes left in the fourth quarter. The 49ers had the ball and were trying to run out the clock when they faced a third-and-5 at the San Diego 40-yard line.
Kaepernick ran to his left on the third-down play, but the Chargers sniffed it out. Once Kaepernick realized he wasn't going to pick up the first down, his main priority should have been staying in bounds to keep the clock moving.
However, Kaepernick inexplicably runs out of bounds for 1-yard loss, saving the Chargers 40 seconds or a timeout. That time proved to be huge just moments later, when the Chargers drove down the field for the tying score with only 32 seconds left.
San Diego would go on to win the game in overtime and hand the 49ers their fourth straight defeat.
Green Bay gambles foolishly
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were terrible offensively on Sunday, but for reasons beyond comprehension the Green Bay Packers tried to keep them in the game.
Up 10-3 midway through the third quarter, Aaron Rodgers and the Packers offense stalled on the Tampa Bay 1-yard line. Instead of kicking an easy field goal on fourth down to go up by 10 points, Mike McCarthy opts to go for it and calls a five-wide formation. Rodgers threw incomplete for Randall Cobb and Green Bay turned it over on downs.
The Packers held on for the win, but risking giving the Bucs some life and keeping it a one-score game made little sense. If Green Bay goes up by two scores at that stage the game is over. With the way Tampa was moving the ball, there was simply no way it could have put together a pair of scoring drives.
By keeping it a seven-point contest, anything can happen. A defensive score or big special teams play could have turned the tide for the Bucs. It just takes one bad bounce to tie the score.
It's understandable that the Packers are the vastly superior squad, but allowing a lesser team to hang around is a risky move.
Justin Tuck's dumb penalty
Justin Tuck saved the Oakland Raiders from embarrassment with a timely timeout a few weeks back, but he was the guilty party this time around.
After the Buffalo Bills scored to cut the Raiders' lead 26-24, they had the difficult task of trying to recover an onside kick and drive down into field goal range with a little more than a minute to go.
Tuck, though, made that task easier by taking an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after the Bills scored. For his argument with the ref, Tuck was assessed a 15-yard penalty and it allowed Buffalo to kickoff from midfield. If they recovered the ball, the Bills would now essentially already be in field goal range for a winning attempt.
As is the Raider way, it appeared Tuck was doing everything he could to help the opponent and ultimately gave a pessimistic Bills fanbase a glimmer of hope for no good reason.
Thankfully for Oakland, Charles Woodson recovered, and the Raiders won their third game of the season in spite of Tuck's best efforts.