I promised a second note last week and forgot. Well here it is, dreadfully late.

An interesting thing happened in the Cleveland-Green Bay game. The Browns were up by 2 points with just over two minutes left and the Packers having no timeouts left. One more first down and the game is over because they’ll be able to kneel down three times and run out the final two minutes.

Trent Dilfer throws a pass complete to Heiden who then breaks free for a first down and keeps running. All he needs to do is get tackled or run out of bounds and the game is over, because kneel-downs are academic. But he did what I see so often, which is keep running all the way to the endzone for a touchdown. Sure that pretty much puts it away, going up by 9 with so little time left. But it actually gives Green Bay a chance because they’ll get the ball back, and you never know what might happen.

Even the commentator said what I hear so often in that situation. “Well, that pretty much cements the win.” Uh, no, had he knelt down or run out of bounds at the 1 yard line, that would have cemented the win. But no players ever do that. Of course not, they want the TD. But it actually gives the other team a pulse, not the opposite.

In fact in this case, Green Bay almost did it. They scored a touchdown with 4 seconds left, and if they had recovered the onside kick and then a hail mary, they could have won. It’s farfetched, but it can happen. One of these days, it will.

I've been getting behind on my posts, and this by no means gets me back on track. But I'm going to do my best to get there... soon... really...