Even "Elite" Coaches Can Make Game Management Look Hard

Les Miles has been very rightly lampooned here and other places for his very high profile mistakes in big spots. He has worked on these issues and they are becoming less frequent, though not totally eliminated.

Gary Patterson, widely cited on this board as an elite coach whom many posters wanted to see replace Les Miles made massive mistakes yesterday. Combine these with the massive errors he made managing the clock in the opener, and it looks like the grass isn't always greener.

Here are a tiny swath of mistakes that compounded atrocious officiating to cost TCU the game (the issues are bolded, the explanation is beneath if you don't want to read the wall of text ):

Poor offensive selection on their best chance to tie the game:

Patterson, with Boykin under center, had the ball with 4 minutes left down one score. They had just completed a touchdown drive where they gashed the Raiders rushing the football. They went three and out. Not a single rush of the football. They had two penalties on that drive compounding those issues (the two penalties occured after first and second down pass attempts, and did not affect the D&D to change the calculus on running on those downs).

Poor understanding of game situations on when to kick field goals:

Gary Patterson sent the kicker out for a 56-yard field goal trailing by seven points in the fourth quarter (14 minutes remaining). While a gutsy call, the call didn't fit the way the game was played and it was a career long attempt for their excellent kicker. It also wasn't a consistent call as shown by Patterson eschewing a field goal when down by 10 with under 45 seconds left.

It is a hard game with a lot of pressure. Even the best can make it look really difficult sometimes.

tl;dr