Now I don't pretend to be a football play calling expert, but I believe I've watched enough to know a few things. Norvall said that the Patriots were bringing pressure, and coming off the edge. Now if you knew this, then there should have been a readily apparent play call there. A screen. When the defense brings pressure, you call a screen. Not that hard to figure out. The Chargers are lucky enough to have one of the faster players in the NFL in Darren Sproles. Give him the ball in space, and let him run. Now the argument could be made, "well, on fourth down you shouldn't throw a pass shorter than 10 yards." Fair enough. Send Vincent Jackson and Chris Chambers on 12 yard out routes and Antonio Gates 12 yards down the middle of the field. It takes them what, 3 seconds to go 12 yards? If you can't protect your quarterback for 3 seconds, you don't deserve to win the game. Now you have three options beyond the first down line. Instead Norvall (if you'll permit a blackjack reference) stayed on 16 with the dealer showing 10, and punted.
Now for the second part of his multi-faceted idiocy-laced quote. "...we had the ball against Tennessee (during the regular season) down 14 points with 10 minutes and scored twice." First of all, Norvy compared the AFC Championship game against the New England Patriots, God's Team, possibly the greatest team in NFL history, to a regular season contest against the Tennessee Titans and their 21st ranked offense. There's so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. To coach the AFC Championship game the same way you would coach a regular season game is funny to begin with, and then to compare the Titans (!!!!111!!!) to the Patriots is pure hilarity. As the people who I watched the game with can attest to, as soon as I saw the punt I said "they're not going to get the ball back." And what do you know, they didn't. The Patriots are a professional football team. They know how to do everything well. They are well coached, they execute well, and with the punt they had all the momentum. How did Norvall think they were going to give the ball back to the Chargers not once, but twice, in a 9 minute span?
When you combine the obvious stupidity of his quote with the two blown red-zone timeouts that Ben mentioned, and the other wasted timeout late in the 4th quarter when the Chargers defense was caught out of position even after the Patriots went into a huddle (another mark of bad coaching...), you can see how Norv Turner is not a Super Bowl caliber head coach. His tenure is already reminiscent of Steve Lavin's years as UCLA Men's Basketball coach. High quality, extremely talented players, baffling losses, shocking wins, and the ability to get close (sweet 16 every year for Lavin, AFC Championship game for Norv) and then have all of the coaching mistakes show themselves in a disappointing loss. But of course, Norv, like Lavin did for quite a few years, did enough to save his job. For now. As a Chargers fan, one can only hope he decides to spend more time with his family, because as long as he continues to have teams be good and not great, his buddy A.J. will never fire him. And the less-informed of the Chargers fan base won't care.
1 North County Times -1/21/08
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Further analysis of the silliness of that quote:
The Chargers punted against the Titans on 4th and 29 from the Titans 40 yard line with 10:36 left. Obvious punting situation there, with no hope of conversion or of making the field goal. Scifres got off a beautiful punt to the Titans' 1 yard line, and the Titans went three and out. The Chargers then got the ball back with 9:01 left on the Titans' 48 yard line.
Here, they punted with 9:13 left, on a fourth and 10 on the 36 yard line. The fourth down was makeable this time, they punted with a minute and a half less time left than before, they were four yards closer, and they were facing a much, much, much better offense. And there was a very low probability of getting a punt as awesome as Scifres' against the Titans because of the weather. A best case scenario had them getting the ball back with 7:30 left at midfield. That's with a quick defensive stop, which they really hadn't gotten in the second half.
What Norval should have taken from the Titans game was that they barely, barely had enough time to score those 14 points against an inferior team, whose offense wasn't nearly as capable of taking time off the clock, when they had punted with 1:30 more time left that last time. This should have informed him that they had basically no chance of scoring twice like they needed to when the situation was worse than it was in Tennessee.
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