Breaking: Dan Campbell has received a warning because of…

Breaking: Dan Campbell has received a warning because of…

Following the Detroit Lions’ 34-31 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Monday, which cost them the opportunity to play in their first Super Bowl, Dan Campbell’s mistakes on fourth downs provided fodder for media discussion.

It’s fair to analyze Campbell’s choices to forgo two field goal attempts in favor of fourth-down tries, but the head coach has always tended to be aggressive in those circumstances. Now, it’s just a part of his and the club’s makeup. Just two years after finishing with three wins, the Lions’ mentality enabled them to make it to the NFC Championship Game.

Whatever your opinion of the fourth-down decisions, the Lions’ worst coaching error of the game was on third-and-goal from the 1-yard line with 10 points behind. A David Montgomery run was called by Detroit, but it was stuffed for a 2-yard loss. The Lions’ first timeout was immediately called by Campbell. Jameson Williams scored the next play, however the Lions were forced to recover an onside kick, a very low-percentage play, in order to have a chance to tie the game after two straight bad calls.

Campbell acknowledged on Monday that, given the circumstances, he probably shouldn’t have run the ball.

“Throwing it is the easy thing to do,” Campbell stated at the press conference on Monday. “I wanted to run it, even though it probably should have been the correct thing to do. I assumed we would simply pop it. They were in a four-down front, and we had only two minutes to throw the ball down the field. I thought we would just walk in, but we missed a block. That being said, I must use a timeout. In retrospect, toss it four times. However, I thought at that very moment that it would be an easy win. And it was unsuccessful. So I took a chance and lost.”

To start, on third down, he did indeed need to pass the ball. While it’s reasonable to speculate that a run at that point may have taken the Niners by surprise and possibly allowed Montgomery to score if Williams made a better block, the danger of being stuffed wasn’t worth it. The Lions ought to have run it on fourth down if they intended to do so during that series.
Secondly, after being stopped, the Lions were halted without needing to use a timeout. In that particular instance, using the timeout to stop the clock was less helpful than keeping it in place. Together with the third-down run play, there ought to have been a communication regarding the fourth-down call. If the run was stuffed, Campbell ought to have had his players prepared to take the snap.

Having three timeouts and forty seconds remaining is preferable than 56 seconds with two timeouts, even if, let’s say, a conservative 20 seconds are taken off the clock. If the Lions had preserved the timeout, at least they would have had a chance to recover the ball. Indeed, with less than a minute remaining and no timeouts, a comeback from behind is improbable. However, that situation is still preferable to one in which an onside kick must be recovered.

The goal-line scenario will go unnoticed because it happened after the Lions had already blown a 24-7 lead at halftime, but in terms of basic decision-making, it was Campbell’s most glaring error of the game.

“This is what you hear about all the time with catastrophes,” added Campbell. “It doesn’t take one or two, it takes 12 things to go wrong, and we did all 12 of those wrong in all three phases.”