Coaches don’t win games, the old saying goes. Players do. But coaches certainly can lose games, a paradox that consumed pro football last week and now is the talk of the college game.
The difference, of course, is that you could actually defend what Bill Belichick did. While there are all manner of rationalizations for Mr. Belichick’s controversial decision to go for a key fourth down in New England’s loss to Indianapolis last week, there’s just no justifying what happened to LSU and Yale Saturday.
LSU lost 25-23 at Mississippi after a series of final-minute mistakes, the most indefensible of which was the Tigers’ failure to attempt either a field goal or a pass into the end zone from the Rebels’ 6-yard line with one second left. Worse than that final sequence, even, was coach Les Miles’s rambling explanation about what went wrong.
wsj.com
11/22/9
