I just watched my beloved Buffalo Bills defeat the Baltimore Ravens by … well, using their brains. And in a way you don’t usually see in a football game.
They won by refusing to score.
The Bills’ lousy first half of play had me thinking I would be spending this afternoon writing about Sophocles’s contribution to political theory, or maybe going for 800 words on how tiresome partisan liberal editorial writers are when they savage the Supreme Court just because they hate judicial decisions that don’t go their way.
But those topics are boring. The question of whether and when you should deliberately allow the other football team to score a touchdown in the NFL is much more exciting than whatever woke controversy we get in pro football over kneeling for the national anthem.
The Bills, on the road in Baltimore, had scored 17 unanswered points in the second half. The game was tied at 20. Late in the fourth quarter, the Bills’ defense staged a goal-line stand (actually intercepting a fourth-down pass into the endzone) after Ravens coach John Harbaugh inexplicably had his team go for it on fourth and goal.
With just a few minutes left in the fourth quarter, quarterback Josh Allen had the Bills driving when the two-minute warning hit. They forced the Ravens to take their last two timeouts because Baltimore wanted to leave something on the clock.
And then, this is where things got a bit crazy. With 1 minute, 43 seconds left in the game, Bills running back Devin Singletary tried to take it in — or at least that’s how it seemed — from about the 11-yard line. According to Ravens coach Harbaugh, the plan was actually to let Singletary into the endzone so that the Ravens would get the ball back with enough time for a quick drive to tie it up and send the game to overtime.
But when you watch the tape, it looks like Singletary went down on purpose at the three yard-line. At least, that was the sense I got. Ravens fans, on the other hand, seem to be blaming some of their own players for tackling him when they weren’t supposed to, but I’ll tell you what — Singletary really does seem to tuck the ball in and go down on purpose.
This resulted in a Bills’ second down. Rather than push into the endzone, Allen very deliberately carried the ball as far as he had to in order to get the first down, then went to the ground.
This left the Ravens unable to stop the clock. Allen knelt the ball twice. The Bills, who had some really atrocious miscues last week managing the clock, called a timeout with three seconds left and then kicked a winning walk-off field goal for a 23-20 win.
I think the idea of just letting the other team score a touchdown on purpose in an NFL game is definitely controversial. But what the Bills just showed is that, at least in certain situations, you can make it backfire. The key: Don’t score the touchdown when they want you to. In this situation, the Ravens presumed that if they just let the Bills into the endzone, they would get the ball back with time to even the score. The Bills, by refusing to score an easy touchdown, were allowed to run 100 seconds off the clock, which in turn left them in a position to win without giving the Ravens a chance.
So be careful with that over-clever strategy of yours.
