As the Bears debacle smoldered on his television Thursday, Patriots coach Jerod Mayo picked up the phone and called Evan Rothstein, the team’s director of game management, to talk strategy.
“Often times it’s easy to second guess and look back on those decisions that are made and say, ‘Well, that’s crazy,’” Mayo told Patriots reporters Friday. “For me it was another … opportunity to be a better football coach.”
And what would he have done?
“I probably would have handled it a little bit differently,” he said. “Easy for me to say, sitting right here.”
Jerod Mayo, career 3-9 football coach, has beaten three of his peers this year. One was Matt Eberflus, earlier this month.
As the NFL world continued to discuss Eberflus’ puzzling decision not to call a timeout as the clock ticked down to zero during Thursday’s 23-20 loss to the Lions, Eberflus again defended his decision Friday.
He laid out two options the Bears had after quarterback Caleb Williams was sacked with 32 seconds left at the Bears’ 41:
• Hurry back to the line of scrimmage, run a play to get into field goal range and take a timeout.
• Or use the last timeout after Williams was sacked, run a play into the middle of the field and sprint the field goal unit onto the field to try a game-tying kick before time expired.
Of course, the Bears did neither. Williams got to the line of scrimmage with 13 seconds to play — Eberflus said the Bears hoped they’d snap the ball with 15 or 20 seconds left — then changed the play because he realized the Bears didn’t have enough time to run one and take a timeout. He threw a deep pass to Rome Odunze that fell incomplete as the clock expired.
“You look at it and hindsight’s 20/20, right?” Eberflus said Friday. “We’re all sitting here on Friday after the game and the first option didn’t work. So obviously you look at the second option and thinking that that would be an option that you should choose.
“But again, we chose the first option, that’s where it was. We hoped we could get the ball snapped off in time and that we’d utilize that timeout and put ourselves in position to kick it.”
Was Williams wrong to check into a different play, sensing the Bears were running out of time?
“The operation is on everybody,” he said. “It’s on me first and then it’s on everybody that’s operating on offense. So we were just hoping that we’d get that play off in time and that didn’t happen. Again, that’s ultimately on me.”
Eberflus said he talked to Williams and offensive coordinator Thomas Brown about the sequence. He later met with Brown as part of the Bears’ standard postgame evaluations.
“Just the penalties, I thought, put us behind the sticks a couple times there,” Eberflus said. “We were in scoring position and really could’ve owned the game from there. But again, ultimately all these decisions are my decision. I take full accountability for them, and we didn’t get it done and it’s unfortunate for the players, for the fans.”
