The decision to punt there could be more excused if it was an isolated incident, but our staff has been pretty consistent in making poor decisions near the end of half, as if they have no awareness of how the clock interacts with the score and/or the situation on the field.
Against Oklahoma in 2014, down 11 with 6 minutes to go, it's obvious to everyone that if we score a TD then we'll go for 2. Except we didn't have a play ready for the 2 point attempt and had to burn a timeout. So we stopped OU and got the ball back with 18 seconds left rather than nearly a minute left. We very well could have won that game had anybody been ready to go for two. West Virginia 2015, down 14 with 9 minutes to go, we kick a FG to still leave ourselves 2 scores behind. It didn't end up mattering because we didn't score again anyway. Against Notre Dame this year we rushed like hell to prevent a delay of game on a frigging extra point kick. Do they not trust our kicker to make an extra point if the LOS is the 8 instead of the 3?
And in the Cal game, the punt decision was the most obvious error we made, but not the only one - we blew it big time in the first half too. On our final drive, Buchele scrambled and then slid too early, very clearly giving himself up before the first down marker. Nobody on the sidelines was paying attention to where Buchele slid OR to the clock, because we waited 7 seconds to call a timeout.
Then on the next play, we actually did make a first down but the clock erroneously kept running. The refs had to blow the whistle, confer, and then come out and say "the clock should have stopped at [time], please reset to [time] and then run the clock on the ready for play signal". This was - or should have been - a big break for us, as even when the clock stops for a first down, it starts up before the offense can line back up to snap the ball and so some time still runs off the clock. But since the refs had to stop, think it over, and then announce to move the clock back, we had all that extra time (a full half a minute) to do ... literally nothing at all. We should have gone ahead and lined up and gotten a play in, and snapped it the moment the ball was ready. Instead, we waited for the ref to start the clock again before doing anything, and burned an extra 9 seconds.
So, 16 total seconds wasted due to an inability to recognize the situation and think quickly on our feet from the coaching staff - in a situation where even a few yards closer on that FG attempt could have made the difference. And, FWIW, the refs did screw us a bit in the end, because they reset the clock wrong. They put it back at 23 when they should have reset it to 26. Still, the 3 seconds the dumb official screwed us out of pales in comparison to the 16 seconds we screwed ourselves out of - although it's pretty hilarious that Sonny Dykes looked disgusted at the officials for making a poor decision that actually ended up favoring his team.
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Last edited: Sep 20, 2016