NFL coaches are brilliant people who have devoted most of their lives to the beautiful game. Even the biggest alleged hacks in the business know more about football than we ever will.
That does not, however, inoculate them from the occasional situational flub. And in the first Sunday of the 2022 NFL season, there were all kinds of situations in which coaches had the opportunity to do the smart thing, and did the other thing instead.
Such brainfarts do not discriminate. In our inaugural edition of the article detailing the worst coaching decisions of the week, we have veterans with multiple playoff wins, Super Bowl coaches, and new guys on the block.
We did a poll for readers asking their opinions of the worst coaching decision of the week so far, and while the entrants were pretty well-balanced, our faithful followers also added a few examples worth discussing.
Here, for your perusal, are the worst coaching decisions of Week 1 of the 2022 NFL season.
Bengals HC Zac Taylor: Leaving too much time on the clock for the Steelers.
(Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports)
In all honesty, the Cincinnati Bengals shouldn’t have even been in this one. That they took the Pittsburgh Steelers into overtime after Joe Burrow’s four interceptions and one fumble seemed like a miracle. But there the Bengals were, with 1:04 left in the game, looking to salvage a 20-20 tie out of the entire disaster. This after Burrow took his seventh sack of the day.
What we do not know is why head coach Zac Taylor didn’t let the clock run all the way down before Kevin Huber’s punt. Instead of bleeding the clock down, the Bengals gave the Steelers 15 extra seconds on the clock.
And with those extra 15 seconds, the Steelers went on an eight-play, 45-yard, 56-second drive that ended with Chris Boswell’s 56-yard game-winning field goal.
What a game indeed, but if the Bengals had forced the Steelers to start that drive with more than a minute on the clock, they may have escaped their own stadium with a tie.
After the game, Taylor said that he was just making sure his team didn’t panic in that situation. Starting long-snapper Clark Harris was out with a biceps injury, putting backup Mitchell Wilcox in the spotlight.
“New operation. We snapped there with 13 seconds, I understand that, trust me, we’d rather do something different. But just trying to make sure the operation ran smoothly, it turned out that we sacrificed some seconds just to make…
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