"Is... football always this exciting?"
No. Sorry. Only when you're trying to will the Dallas Cowboys to victory. They didn't coin the phrase "RomoCoaster" for no reason. I suspect being a fan of the 13-0 Green Bay Packers is not exciting, with their 46-16 yawn-win over the Oakland Raiders. Boring! And don't even get me started on the past few years with the Mavericks and the Rangers. It can be a gut-wrenching place, Dallas.
So. Back to time outs, since it is the subject of more questions this week. I clearly did not actually explain the science of time outs in the last post. So here it is for you. Each team gets 3 time outs per half of game. They're give at the start of each half (not counting overtime, which has it's own timeouts) and they do not roll over like cell phone minutes. You use them or lose them.
Moments in which to use timeouts are usually pretty cut and dry.
- Your defense in not ready for the play, and the offense is about to snap the ball. Anytime your defense is not ready, the offense can easily score a touchdown. It's a professional league, after all; you'd expect nothing less.
- Your offense is not ready for the play, and the play clock (the clock they use to enforce timely games - 40 seconds from the conclusion of the previous play to start the next one) is almost at zero. There's a 5 yard penalty for letting the play clock wind to zero on offense.
- You are trying to conserve precious clock seconds as the final seconds tick away, to give yourself a chance to win. When the ball is 'downed' in the field of play, that is, the play did not end out of bounds, the game clock keeps running down. A time out stops the game clock until the start of the next play, saving you 40 seconds of game time, which can be a lot in football.
That's about it. You don't want to waste time outs early in the half and then have none when you really need it - say, you're trying to squeak out a victory with a kick in the last seconds, but in order to kick a field goal, you need to change all the personnel on the field. The clock does not stop for this, so you'll want a time out in your pocket in case the game clock is still going. You can stop it at 1 second, and get that last play off in time.
But, like any good video game, you almost always horde those time outs then leave them on the table. A coach that is busy winning the game usually doesn't have much reason to stop the clock and allow the other team time to get back in the game. So, at the very tail end of close games, you'll see one team trying to grind the clock to zero to preserve a win, and the other trying desperately to save seconds. When this situation gets all the way down to that last field goal kick, many coaches 'ice' the kicker: take a final timeout just before the kick goes off, so that play doesn't count, and pretty much forcing the kicker to think about it for 30 more seconds.
It's a silly and largely empty gesture. The pressure's already on to win or tie the game, and the kicker probably won't get any more nervous or jittery if you take a time out just as he makes the first attempt and force him to take another. But it's the only action you can take, and you don't exactly need those time outs for anything either way, so almost everyone does it. It's probably backfired as many times as it's succeeded - the first kick did not go through, and the second does. But even if there's not much to be gained, there's not much to be lost.
And yesterday, the giants lucked out on the ice.
