Questionable Call of the Week: Why Didn’t Kolb Just Take A Knee?

Submitted by Brandon on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 5:04pm

I think I’m going to start picking out a particularly awful moment from either a D.C. or a Philly sports game and labelling it the “Questionable Call of the Week”. This week’s comes from the Philadelphia Eagles’ 37-19 loss to the NFC East-rampaging Tennessee Titans.

 

I know it’s likely that the game has already become the distant past as the team and its fans look forward to playing the Indianapolis Colts after the bye, but since it’s an off-week and there’s some time to kill, I’ll tell you why I have a huge problem with how the team chose to end their game on Sunday afternoon.

 

It’s really simple: Why not take a knee to end the game? If teams do it at the end of the first half, why not at the end of the second?

 
I saw this going differently in my mind.
 

Let’s go back to the Eagles’ final drive at LP Field in Tennessee. The team got the ball back on its own 20-yard line with a scant 22 seconds left on the game clock. At this time, they were only losing 30-19 and really had no hope of completing the hail-mary TD pass, recovering the onside-kick, and completing the other hail-mary TD pass that it would have required to beat the Titans.

 
But that didn’t stop Andy Reid from trying. He dialed up a short pass play to LeSean McCoy that went for 3 yards and resulted in left tackle King Dunlap being flagged for offensive holding. 14 seconds left on the clock, ball at the 10-yard line.
 
At this point, why not take a knee, toss the ball to the ref, and hit the showers? Nothing bad would come of it, except maybe ruffling the feathers of the Philly faithful that had made the trip out to Tennessee  and paid good money to watch their team blow a fourth-quarter lead. But next Sunday is another day. Time to cut your losses and pack it in until the Colts come to town.
 
But that’s not what Andy Reid had in mind. If his team was going down, then by golly, they were going down swinging. So he dialed up the classic end-of-game hail-mary scenario, courtesy of the arm of Kevin Kolb and the hands of Riley Cooper. And when Kolb put the ball up in the air, sure enough, it was caught by the Titans’ Cortland Finnegan who returned it 41 yards for a TD. Titans 37, Eagles 19.
 
I’m willing to bet that most Eagles fans would rather have seen their team call it quits and lose by 11 than “keep on trucking” and lose by 18. But that’s just me.
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