Best Of - Eagles, Commanders & Bills CLOCK DISASTERS, Nick GETS HONEST on Tyreek Hill, NFL Week 6 Predictions

Nick Wright (0:00)

Welcome to the best of the week for What's Wright? with Nick Wright. The best takes and moments from this week on the show. Enjoy.

Sunday morning in London, guys can't figure out time score situation. Sunday afternoon in the States, guys can't figure out time score situation. And then even including Monday night, the very end of Monday night, guys can't figure out time score situation. And I will get into the nitty gritty of it when we discuss each and every one of those games. But this is, and I hate to be, you know, Mr. Captain Nerd here, but this is the biggest and most glaring market inefficiency left, maybe in pro sports, but certainly in the NFL, where you are a hard capped league, where everyone in theory has the same amount of finite resources.

The amount you can spend on free agents, the trade capital you have via the draft, all of that is to level the playing field. The schedule is set to level the playing field. Everything is to try to make the edges as small as possible. And while teams will spend seemingly infinite in a quest to build the best roster, even though everyone can really only spend the same amount, or to find the next quarterback, or on getting Jim Harbaugh to come coach your team, or keeping Sean McVeigh as your head coach, or some, we got coordinators now making three to five million dollars a year. The fact that so few teams seem willing to, I can't believe you need to have it, but bring in someone, not only to be a clock and game management expert, but to drill your head coach, your offensive coordinator, and your quarterback into understanding the situations at hand here. Because, I guess, you know what? I will get into it somewhat here, each individual instance, why they were so glaring. That way we can just do the clock management stuff here, and then we will discuss the other pieces of those games. In chronological order that they occurred, in the London game, folks killing Nick Sirianni for kicking off, as opposed to kicking it into the back of the end zone, those people are misguided. That was a 50-50, 55-45 call. There is a good argument as to why you would kick off in that spot. Why you would, say, with 8 seconds left, with the opposing team having the best, the strongest leg kicker in the league, I think just kicking it out of the back of the end zone, giving Trevor Lawrence the ball in the 35, where if he completes a 15-yard pass to the sidelines, we can lose. That we think it's smarter to kick off, cover the kick, and make it so it is Hail Mary or nothing else, unless we give up one of the longest kick returns any team has given up in the league all year. That wasn't the catastrophe game management-wise. That wasn't where Sirianni and Hertz and Company lost the game. It is where they lost the game, but that was the failure there was not, I don't want to say it wasn't preventable, but it was a physical error in kick coverage. That can happen, and kicking it out in the back of the end zone, it wasn't the same as Ravens Cowboys because Ravens had a timeout, the Jags didn't have a timeout in this scenario, but it was justifiable to kick it, even though you had given up the big kick return early in the game. That was justifiable. What was not justifiable was the sequence when Philly had the ball with 25 seconds left after Jacksonville uses their second timeout. And this is where time score situation must be understood. If you are the Philadelphia Eagles, and the other team has one timeout left, and you are at their 34 yard line, and there is 25 seconds left, there is no scenario that should exist where you are ever kicking off.

You must, especially because, and this is important, Philly has a timeout of their own. So they have the ability to do whatever they need to do game management-wise and not have to worry about a Washington situation coming up. It's first down, there is 25 seconds left, the Jags have one timeout. The single most important thing that has to occur is, you must force Jacksonville to use that timeout before you get to third down.

If you do that, then you guarantee that you have the ability to be kicking with two seconds left on the clock and your kick will be the final play of the game. On first down, Philly sees it's a zero blitz from Jacksonville and Jaylen throws it away. Now, it's a poor throw away and because of that, it's almost intercepted, but still, that's not a catastrophic error.