NO SHUR' THING
Coach makes one very wrong decision with pointless two-point conversion
ATLANTA — This is where old-school meets New Age helmet-to-helmet, and someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to be placed in some kind of protocol. This is where calculus meets concrete. Right here:
The Giants, struggling all night, finally made some headway against the Falcons late in the fourth quarter Monday. Atlanta receded into a prevent defense, the Giants seized, Saquon Barkley bulled his way in from the 2yard line, and the Giants trimmed the Falcons’ lead to 20-12.
There was a timeout so the review booth could make sure Barkley really broke the plane. He did. Everyone turned their attention back to the field, to watch Giants kicker Aldrick Rosas boot the extra point to bring the Giants within a touchdown …
Except Rosas was nowhere to be seen. The Giants offense was on the field. They were going for two. All across America, certainly all across Greater New York, the reaction of millions of fans who have watched thousands of football games was exactly the same: “WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?” For a second, Eli Manning had Odell Beckham Jr. open in the end zone, but these are the 2018 Giants, and the red zone turns into quicksand for them at almost every turn. The 72,756 dirty birds filling MercedesBenz Stadium roared in disbelief because they thought what everyone back home thought.
The Giants’ coach, Pat Shurmur, had clearly lost his mind.
“I wanted to be aggressive for the guys,” Shurmur would say later, when all the points he’d helped leave on the field all night had spelled the difference in a 23-20 loss to the Falcons which dropped the Giants to 1-6 on the season.
And … well, that was the worst answer Shurmur could have given.
Because that is an old-school, my-gut-told-me-to-put-myfaith-in-the-guys-and-their-bigold-hearts take, and if you are going to defend the indefensible, you’d better make your argument using a different trick of the trade: math.
Eventually, Shurmur would do that.
“You increase your chances by 50 percent,” Shurmur said, and the mathematicians in their lab coats who had studied this concurred. I’m not going to get in the way of their decimal points and parentheses, but in summary, in a vacuum, if you go for
two there and miss, you still have the chance to tie with another touchdown and another two-point try (which have 50 percent success ratios). If you make it the first time, a simple PAT wins you the game if you score again.
Doug Pederson tried this a few weeks ago for the Eagles, and since Pederson is the darling of just about every faction of football because his team is the defending champion, he was lauded for his forward thinking. But Pederson coaches the Eagles, and we saw last year just how good they are in the red zone.
Shurmur coaches the Giants. He’s seen with his own eyes, as well as everyone else, the Giants are no sure thing this year no matter how close to the goal line they are. Math is fine in that vacuum. In the real world, a coach has to go with reason there. He had to kick the PAT there. It was just one part of a bad night for Shurmur, who left more points on the field earlier when he decided to go for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal. Manning missed Beckham with a step on his man, threw into traffic, and Shurmur was nice enough to be caught on camera saying what was on everyone else’s mind:
“WHAT? THROW IT TO ODELL!”
Then, later, with the Giants out of timeouts, with them on another doorstep, with precious seconds ticking away, Giants fans were treated to the sight of the 37-year-old Manning trying to sneak one over from the 1. AND THEN TRYING IT AGAIN ON THE NEXT PLAY!
No, this wasn’t a game that Shurmur is going to want to put in his personal time capsule. Most weeks, it really doesn’t seem to matter what he does because the Giants’ roster is such a mess, and it’s probably past time anyway to finally identify where this team is — the early stages of a long, painful, deliberate and necessary rebuild (albeit with a 37-year-old QB, but that’s another screed for another day).
Still, this one falls on Shurmur. Bad choices all night. And, at the end, this remarkably tonedeaf defense of his team: “Did our guys not play hard? Did our guys not play to the end?”
Time was, a Giants head coach was known to say, “There are no medals for trying.” Shurmur should try putting that one on for size starting right
now.