Back to the Top News Newsfeed

Second Nature: Why NFL coaches are so prone to clock management blunders

Plays are precious; seconds are plays; therefore, seconds are precious.

—Homer Smith

If you lived on Enterprise Avenue in Tuscaloosa, Ala., around the turn of the millennium, you did not see much of the Smiths on fall Saturdays. True, Homer and Kathy hadn’t had a free autumn weekend since roughly 1948, but now their lack of availability wasn’t because Homer was on the sideline coaching college football (as he did for 36 years, plus one with the Chiefs). No, he was now busy hunting the game’s most cryptic secrets.

An unknowing neighbor cracking open the front door would have found the married couple of nearly five decades scurrying up and down their stairs like figures in Escher’s Relativity, carrying videotapes and yelling things like, “Is Tech over?