I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but how is our coaching staff’s clock management so poor, year after year?

There’s 2:07 left in the game. It’s 1st down on NE’s 4-yard line. We throw the 3 yard pass to Murray and the Pats get flagged for an illegal contact penalty. Instead of accepting it and getting it on the 2 yard line (and get another down) we decline the penalty, making it 2nd and goal from the 1. We score within 7 seconds of that call, leaving the Patriots 2 minutes to drive down the field and score.

All things considered, Mac Jones isn’t someone you’d consider a “threat” to lead a game-winning drive in the final minutes. But given how he was playing during that particular game, he had been carving up our D the whole game.

That being said, why not take the penalty and get an extra try to score? We could have easily ran 4 run plays (Qb sneak or Cook or Murray). Cook was averaging over 4ypc that game. Murray and Josh were both averaging over 2ypc. Wouldn’t it have made most sense to take the penalty and then burn as much clock as possible?

It’s not like we had a choice at that point. We HAD to score, regardless. So if we’re gonna win that game, we were gonna score with 2 minutes to spare or score with 30 seconds to spare. At the VERY LEAST, if we run the ball and don’t get in right away, we force New England to burn thru the 2-minute warning and their last 2 timeouts (of which played an essential part in their game-winning drive.)

It’s just frustrating and blows my mind that we have a HC who constantly hammers “the fundamentals” of the game vs being overly creative, yet still can’t seem to manage the fundamentals of clock management.