I have a few thoughts on this weekend’s NFL action. I’ll start with one of my favourite QBs, Kurt Warner and how he and his new team blew his chance to exact “revenge” against the team that unceremoniously dismissed him after having led them to two Super Bowls. (I’m not saying they made a mistake… okay, I am, but that’s a topic for another post.)

But there’s two things I don’t understand about how the game ended. With 27 seconds left and no timeouts, the Cardinals are at the Rams’ 5 yard line on first down trailing by 5 points. For some reason Warner takes the snap from under centre instead of from the shotgun. The Rams come with the blitz and get Warner down before he’s even able to drop back two steps. That was a bad play call, IMHO, but I don’t know if it was Warner or the coach or the co-ordinators.

But then, as the time is ticking off, instead of lining up and spiking the ball to stop the clock, giving them two more downs and enough time for two more shots to the end zone, Warner tries to call another play on the fly. Only 7 seconds remain when the ball is snapped, but there was a false start (which I didn’t see myself, but that’s another beef), which because it was an offensive penalty by a team with no timeouts under two minutes, signifies the end of the game. Why oh why didn’t they spike the ball? Again, I don’t know if it was Warner who screwed up or if the coaches were telling him to go ahead with a play to try to catch the defence disorganized. Evidently, they caught themselves disorganized and it cost them the game.

Yet it also brought up another point, which is why that rule exists. Namely, if an offensive team commits a foul in the last two minutes of the game, then there is a 10 second run-off of time on the clock. The exception is that if the team has a timeout left, they have the option of using it to avoid the run-off. Presumably, this is to stop teams who are out of timeouts late in the game from getting a “cheap” timeout, by intentionally committing a false start and thus exchanging a loss of 5 yards for some extra time to prepare for the next play. Okay, I’ll buy that, but I think there should be another exception. A team should be able to take a loss of down instead of the time run-off. It’s the same concept. If the team “could have” taken a timeout, then they just as easily “could have” spiked the ball.

In this case, instead of the game just ending because of a questionable false start, the team should be penalized 5 yards as usual, but also lose a down in lieu of the time run-off, as if the team had immediately lined up again 5 yards back and spiked the ball. That way they don’t gain an advantage as if they had had a timeout, but there not so severely punished for a simple penalty. The game shouldn’t have ended the way it did.

My thoughts on another game will come later this week…