Matt Zeitlin

Since my own team — the Raiders– are currently down 10-0 to the worst non-Raiders team in the NFL, I’ll turn my attention to Matt Yglesias’ criticism of the Redskins overtime strategy:

 Since it worked, of course, Joe Gibbs is going to wind up not taking criticism for his odd decision to kick the early field goal instead of continuing to run the football, but I still don’t like the decision. Not only does it seem wrong on the merits to me, but it seems strange to start off your season with a vote of no confidence in your running backs.

The first thing is that Joe Gibbs showed nothing but confidence in his running backs in the overtime, Betts and Portis got the ball on 8 out of the 10 Redskins overtime plays.  Besides that, on the merits, I think that kicking the field goal on first down was probably the best call for the situation.

The ‘skins were on the 22, which meant a 39 yard field goal.  From 30-39 yards, Suisham is a career 6/7, while from 20-29, he’s 4/4.  At that point, there’s a very high probability that Suisham would make the field goal from that distance, while the risk of a fumble on a run — which could lose the game — is probably high enough to advise extreme caution.  Additionally, there’s the non trivial risk of a fumble on the snap-and-hold (see Romo, Tony).  By kicking on first down, in case of a bungled snap, they had a chance for a reasonably distanced kick on 2nd down — 46 yards — or even getting some of the yardage back on a Portis run, setting up a third down kick of 46 yards or shorter.  Overall, certainly not a bad call by Gibbs, even though I’d probably think differently had Suisham missed the field goal.
The real debate is whether the NFL overtime rules are at all sensible.  According to Penn State economist Richard Hawkins, there is a “99.99 % certainty that the [coin] flip has made a difference in the outcome of the game over the last 10 years.” Here’s an in-depth discussion of the effect of the coin flip on overtime (there definitely is one) and if there’s a better overtime set-up(probably not).