Quote:
Originally Posted by Talisman
As much as I hate the Bills, I think I would have rather we just lost last week. The 13 second comeback and walk off TD in OT made it feel like it was another destiny year. Grim Reaper and 13 seconds memes were everywhere and it was all downhill to the SB from there. To be up 18 and slowly choke it away just felt so pre-Mahomes. I honestly thought those days were behind us. To be riding on such a high and then shit the bed so thoroughly was brutal. Imagine being someone waiting for your #15 Grim Reaper t-shirt to come in the mail this week.
The thing that's nagging me the most is first and goal from the five at the end of the game. You need to score, but are also good with burning some clock. What should you do? Maybe we could go back to the previous Bengals game and get an idea. You run it. And then you run it again. And then you run it again. The clock burns and if you don't get in, you can make a decision on 4th and goal from the one on whether to risk going for it to punch your way into the SB. What you don't do is try to pass when your QB knows he shouldn't throw it away and stop the clock. You are forcing him to either score or take a sack. And we know how that turned out.
Winning it all a couple years back takes the sting out of it a little. Playoff collapses of the past had felt like nails getting driven into a decades old casket and had me wondering if we would ever make it to the Super Bowl in my lifetime.
|
I'll shake my head vigorously at the thought of a first-round playoff loss. I've had enough of those to last a lifetime.
The goal-line sequence at the end of regulation is the worst part of that game for me by a long shot. The play before halftime was a gaffe, and hurt us. But the series at the end of the game haunts me. We have Patrick Mahomes II, so it never even occurred to me that they wouldn't score a touchdown. I was busy watching the clock, and while running seemed like an obvious thing to do, I'll never complain about Patrick Mahomes having the ball in his hands.
That's a good observation about a pass play either stopping the clock or scoring too quickly, though. I hadn't thought about it that way. That situation might explain why he was scrambling in the backfield and not just running it in or throwing.