Andy Reid is alone on an island thinking his Kansas City Chiefs handled the clock correctly at the end of the AFC divisional matchup against the New England Patriots last weekend.
Speaking with 610 Sports Radio’s “The Drive” show on Thursday, Reid defended his team’s snail’s-pace scoring drive late in the fourth quarter:
“I think clock management’s very important,” Reid said. “Every situation’s different. It’s a fluid situation on the spot and you’ve got to go off of feel. . . . This situation, I think, was handled right.”
The drive itself was gargantuan 16-play, 80-yard affair that took five minutes, 16 seconds off the clock and left just one minute, 13 seconds to attempt an onsides kick to set up a potential game-winning drive.
The worst part? The Chiefs still had three timeouts remaining, meaning they could have saved at least some time off the unbelievably time-consuming scoring drive in which Alex Smith and his offense actually huddled on more than one occasion. But Reid defended that decision, too.
“I thought we handled it right,” Reid said. “You give us a minute on the clock and three timeouts, we feel like we can move the ball pretty good.”
He also said that the offense didn’t hurry up as much as most thought it should have because “At that point it really didn’t matter to me. I wanted to make sure we were calling the best plays.”
Reading this, Chiefs fans (and Philadelphia Eagles fans) must be pulling their hair out.
Everyone watching the playoff game last weekend knew the Chiefs were wasting precious time. There was absolutely no urgency to move the ball down the field, which is why the drive went 16 plays to start with.
In situations like they faced, down by two scores with less than seven minutes left in the game, every other team in the league would have been operating in a no-huddle to try and score as quickly as possible.
But not the Chiefs. Not Andy Reid.