Analyzing end of the game football strategy

Here was the situation at the end of yesterday’s Lions-Vikings game. Detroit was trailing by a point, and had just made three long gains on consecutive plays to give them a first down at the Minnesota 22. The clock is stopped with 1:07 to go as Minnesota has used its first time out to stop it.

This means that if Detroit runs the ball three times they are likely to be able to try a pretty short field goal with 20 seconds left if they don’t make a first down.

What should Detroit do and how should Minnesota react? What happened is that the Lions ran the ball for no gain on first down, then Dan Campbell decided to do two kneel downs that collectively lost four yards, which resulted in a 43-yard FG attempt with 19 seconds to go.

Two aspects of this struck me as interesting. First, should Minnesota have just let Detroit score on the first down run? This would give them the ball back trailing by five or six with a minute to go and two timeouts. That’s obviously a better situation than what they ended up with, which was being down by two points with 15 seconds to go and no time outs. But of course that required Detroit to make the FG.

As for Detroit, I thought Campbell made a strange decision to not try to pick up some more yards. (Campbell is usually really good about these kinds of calculations — he goes for it on fourth down more than any other NFL coach). I realize NFL FG kickers have gotten ridiculously good, but there’s still a non-trivial difference between a 43 and a 33 yard FG, plus if they picked up the first down with two more carries they would have a chip shot FG that would be the last play of the game.

Getting really galaxy-brained, if Minnesota had decided to let Detroit score, it would have made sense for the Jaymar Gibbs to kneel down at the one yard line instead of going into the end zone. This would allow Detroit to run out the clock before attempting a FG with a 98%-99% chance of success.

Anyway, Minnesota got the ball back and on a controversial play got to the 50 and spiked the ball with one second left on the clock, although it was clear the clock should have run out on the spike. They weren’t lined up in a legal formation so they got penalized 5 yards, which removed what would have been an interesting decision — try a 67 yard FG (a yard further than the record, which was set on the last play of a game against Detroit. The previous record had also been set on the last play of a game against Detroit, so there could have been something karmic going on), rather than a hail Mary pass. That I think would be a tough call, as the odds of success would of course be very low for either, and the Vikings’ kicker’s career long is “only” 58 yards. But the penalty took that decision out of play.

I thought it was an interesting sequence, that implicates some tactical decisions that have gotten a lot more complicated, as coaches have slowly gotten more sophisticated about this stuff.