Why talk about the Green Bay Packers losing to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game on a site called Badgers Wire? Why remind Wisconsin sports fans of a depressing moment? To educate, of course.
Keep in mind that we kept the Packers off this site on Monday. We did this so that everyone could step away from the gloom for a day and cleanse themselves of the misery of waking up in the morning after another NFC Championship Game loss.
Now that we have had a day to vent/digest/absorb/accept, and do all the other things sports fans genuinely need to do after a defeat in a big game, we can more calmly confront what this game taught us about the Wisconsin Badgers, chiefly head coach Paul Chryst: He got better at his job in 2019 in one specific way. He went for it a lot more on fourth downs.
We know that Chryst going for it more on fourth downs was one of the more pleasant and exciting aspects of the 2019 season. It showed a willingness to embrace football analytics, but there’s more to it than that. I embraced going for it on fourth down before analytics became a thing.
What Chryst showed beyond his embrace of analytics was a simple willingness to trust his program’s philosophy, cultivated by Barry Alvarez.
When I say that I embraced going for it on fourth down before analytics became more widely accepted, I am trying to convey a point which goes beyond analytics. That point is as follows: Going for it on fourth down is valuable not just because of what the analytics say. It is important because it expresses trust in players.
When coaches trust players to perform, players generally respond to that kind of coaching. A good coaching decision isn’t just tactical or situational; it is meant to show players, “Hey, we practice these plays all the time. We live for these situations as a football team. If you’re coached properly, you will execute when you need to.” It is a message which applies to a specific situation yet extends to the broader coach-player relationship and the year-long process of teaching players how to play.
You go for it on fourth and one not just to keep the ball away from a good opposing offense, or to take more time off the clock, but to tell your players you trust them to apply the teaching and the guidance you give them in practice and in film study. Sending this message of trust means as much in the realm of motivation as a fiery speech in the locker room before kickoff. Coaches can give all the rousing locker-room speeches they want, but if they chicken out on fourth and one, those fierce messages don’t mean squat.
With all this in mind, let’s now realize why — and how — Matt LaFleur of the Green Bay Packers vindicated Paul Chryst’s 2019 movement toward more aggression on fourth downs.
I won’t spend a lot of time on this next point, but I have to at least mention the game, painful thought it is for Wisconsin sports fans: In the January 2015 NFC Championship Game in Seattle, Mike McCarthy kicked a bunch of field goals inside the Seattle 10-yard line. He wimped out on fourth down and short. Yes, had the Packers not bobbled an onside kick, they would have won… but if they had scored touchdowns and not field goals, the game would have been completely out of the Seahawks’ reach by that point. It wasn’t out of reach, and you know how that game ended.
We all should have expected a Packer coach to realize, in a new NFC Championship Game, the absolute NECESSITY of going for it on fourth down, ESPECIALLY on the road, and even more especially against a team which had already crushed the Packers in the regular season.
Anyone with half a brain knew that if the Packers were going to beat the 49ers on Sunday, they would need to be very aggressive on fourth down. They would need to keep that nasty Niner running game off the field. They would need to play their best game of the season BY FAR.
Matt LaFleur punted on fourth and one at midfield in the first quarter.
For so long in both college and pro football, coaches have wimped out on fourth down because of the weak rationalization that if they fail, their team is in a really bad position. Punting enables a coach to say, “I played field position. I didn’t put our team and our defense at risk.” It has been a safe “percentage” answer for decades.
The other side of the coin has always been that punting on fourth and one fails to trust elite players to get a yard in a key situation. Punting gives up a possession. Punting enables the other team to get the ball and dictate how the game is played. All these concepts — and the debates surrounding them — can be very abstract, like a conversation in a philosophy or a logic class. It’s all on paper, in theory, written on a board. It might not seem to matter.
Then you apply it to a live game, and you instantly see why — and how — the logic of punting or kicking a 19-yard field goal simply doesn’t hold up against the logic of going for a first down or touchdown on fourth down.
The Packers, of ALL teams in the NFL, should have known after their 2015 experience in Seattle that wimping out on fourth down was NOT the way to play it in Santa Clara, California. Matt LaFleur ignored recent history, and paid the price.
Paul Chryst probably would have coached the Packers better than LaFleur did on Sunday. I have absolutely zero doubt about that statement. Do you?
One coach actually would have gone for it on fourth down in the first quarter… and that coach is clearly not Matt LaFleur.