Super Bowl Postscript: Replaying the Last Hand

Just a short postscript today on Super Bowl XLIX after reading New England fan Bill Simmons’s lengthy “Retro Running Diary” of the game.

To refer to anything Simmons posts over on Grantland as “lengthy” is redundant, as word count often trumps most other considerations with his stuff (a subject about which I’ve written here before.) But in this case there’s a decent amount of quality along with the quantity as he narrates in minute detail the roller coaster ride taken by the world’s most verbose Pats fan as he watched that incredible game and finish on Sunday.

The most intriguing part of the article (for me) comes near the end when Simmons attempts to come to grips with the seemingly baffling decision made by New England head coach Bill Belichick not to use one of the Pats’ two remaining timeouts when there was almost exactly one minute to go and Seattle was readying for a second-and-goal at New England’s one-yard line.

Rather that call the TO, Belichick let the clock run with more than 30 seconds ticking away before the Seahawks snapped it with 0:26 left for what would become a stunning interception to end (essentially) their title hopes. Like most everyone, Simmons found the lack of a timeout bewildering at the time, and if you scroll down to that part of his article there are some funny animated .gifs helping underscore his confusion.

At that point Simmons steps back and with a full day’s worth of hindsight is able to construct a kind of hypothesis to explain Belichick’s thinking, aided in part (he says) by a Washington Post article by Adam Kilgore explaining why it could be considered a “sneaky-brilliant decision” insofar as in a strange way it might well have helped coerce Seattle into the pass call.

Simmons also spoke with a couple of N.E. guys (“two of my Patriots sources”) in addition to rewatching the end several times. “A long, fascinating email from a poker player helped” as well, explains Simmons, who then goes into a further elaboration of Kilgore’s idea that by not calling the timeout, Belichick invited Seattle to consider other options when it came to that second down play call, options which in the frenzied, pressurized atmosphere of the moment perhaps became trickier to evaluate.

In other words, the idea Simmons pursues is that by not calling the TO, Belichick did something that momentarily perplexed an opponent that had expected him to do just that. “He wanted confusion and chaos,” opines Simmons. “He wanted that in-game pressure to tilt Seattle’s way.... [He] felt that in-stadium energy shifting after Lynch’s first-down run [the previous play],” and so in the moment decided not to stop the clock and thereby mess with Seattle’s collective head.

The decision also had a concrete purpose -- to elicit the possibility of a particular pass play (the slant) against which New England had specifically prepared to defend. In any event, it sounds like the poker player (who? I wonder) helped Simmons put the whole situation into terms that made Belichick’s move not only seem understandable, but truly inspired.

“This was now a poker game,” writes Simmons. “What do you do when you know you have the lousier hand? You bluff.”

I like the analogy, and not just because Belichick often wears a hoodie. The Pats absolutely had “the lousier hand” in that spot, although I’m not sure I’d describe the non-action of not calling a timeout as a “bluff.” Rather it was just an unexpected play that suddenly put the pressure on Seattle when deciding how to answer -- as though one player has made a confident bet that looks like it will be enough to win the pot, then another makes a surprising all-in push that forces the first into a much-harder-than-expected decision.

I mean, folding seemed the right play, if we want to regard calling the TO there thusly. Heck, announcer Chris Collinsworth was even bringing up the “let them score and get the ball back” idea, which of course would have represented another kind of folding in this spot.

But no, Belichick didn’t fold. He shoved. By not stopping the clock, he made it clear the game was going to end on this hand, and there would be no next one.

If you’re still thinking about the game and that crazy ending, I recommend spending a short while reading Simmons’s story of it. His lyrical conclusion regarding Belichick’s persona, reputation, and possible legacy works well, and is somewhat persuasive, too -- so much so that even this non-Pats fan couldn’t help but appreciate it.

Whether or not Belichick knew exactly what he was accomplishing by not calling that timeout, I’m convinced it wasn’t simply a momentary lapse or something done without purpose. He absolutely meant not to call the TO, all right, although I’m not quite ready to allow that he knew what would happen next with as much precision as Simmons appears ready to believe.

It was assuredly a poker game, that ending. And good gosh, what a river.

What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

“Quarterback says he ‘didn’t alter the ball’?”

So said Vera to me a short while ago, reading in a questioning tone a headline appearing on the CNN website this evening. (I’d give the link, but I’m kind of loathing the new design at CNN, never mind the autoplaying Esurance commercial. Oh, and the sensationalized, SEO-driven, tabloid-y approach to reporting news.)

Vera isn’t a huge sports fan, and so hasn’t really been following the story of the 11 deflated footballs used by the New England Patriots during the first half of their drubbing of the Indianapolis Colts in last Sunday’s AFC Championship game -- a story that picked up renewed vigor today after the press conferences of coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.

I’m not going to rehearse all of the details of the story here. If you’re like Vera and haven’t heard all about it yet, it’s easy enough to read further online. And if you’re like me and have, well, then you don’t need a summary.

I’ve been having some fun this week tweeting various comparisons between the situation -- predictably dubbed “Deflate-gate” -- and Watergate, given how both involve allegations of cheating against heavily favored entities with histories of “dirty tricks.” And with today’s twin denials of knowledge by Belichick and Brady and the relentless nature of the continued questioning and swirling suspicion, the idea of some kind of “cover up” is now in play as well to further the analogy.

“I had no knowledge whatsoever of this situation until Monday morning,” said Belichick. “I have no knowledge of anything... I have no knowledge of any wrongdoing,” added Brady. Statements that the chorus of doubters responding afterwards -- some especially indignant -- don’t seem ready to accept.

There’s a lot of emphasis on the “integrity of the game” being threatened by the episode (again, not unlike the integrity of the electoral process back in ’72). Even if New England trounced Indy 45-7 (like Nixon trounced McGovern 520 to 17), thereby making any ball-altering shenanigans seem less meaningful from a results-oriented perspective, it surely isn’t fair for one side to run its offense with balls inflated more favorably (i.e., well under the league-determined level) than the other, right?

To draw a poker analogy, it sounds a little like someone playing the first half of a heads-up cash game session knowing there were only three aces in the deck. Sure, both are playing with the same deck, but one has more accurate knowledge about that deck than the other. Depending on how the other 51 cards were dealt, it could matter greatly or not at all.

With today’s pressers the story has moved from the sports pages onto CNN and other news sites, with non-football fans like Vera now asking football fans like me what the deal is with the Super Bowl-bound QB denying cheating allegations. Brady didn’t say “I’m not a crook” today, although he did have to respond to the question (posed somewhat within a hypothetical) “Is Tom Brady a cheater?” with the statement “I feel like I’ve always played within the rules.”

I’m no great fan of the Pats or Belichick or Brady -- my ambivalence towards N.E. tracing back to their dramatic last-second Super Bowl win over my Panthers over a decade ago -- which means I’m kinda sorta enjoying all the nonsense on a certain anarchy-loving level only available to those of us on the sidelines without a specific rooting interest.

But I also think that unlike Watergate, there’s not much to this silly sideshow at all. My answer to Vera’s question, then, wasn’t really an answer.

“It’s all anyone’s talking about right now,” I said to her, shaking my head. And then we talked about something else.