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Mike Vrabel uses Bill Belichick's own NFL rulebook loophole against him in Titans win over Patriots
The Patriots coach is always one step ahead of the rest of us except for Saturday night
www.cbssports.com
Whenever Bill Belichick decides to retire, he's almost certainly going to go down as the greatest coach in NFL history, and if you need any more proof of what makes Belichick so great, all you have to do is re-watch the fourth quarter of New England's 33-0 win over the Jets on Monday.
Even when the Patriots are blowing out the other team, like they were in New York, Belichick never stops coaching, and that became evident after the Patriots went three-and-out on a drive in the fourth quarter. If that happened to most coaches in the NFL, they would just punt the ball away, but Belichick isn't most coaches. Instead of quickly punting the ball, Belichick took advantage of a loophole in the NFL rulebook to run a full minute and 21 seconds off the clock before his team actually punted.
In the NFL, the play clock is only 40 seconds long, which means it's not easy to burn nearly 90 seconds like the Patriots did, but it happened, and Belichick was definitely proud of himself for it, because the camera caught him smiling, which is something he almost never does during a game.
View: https://twitter.com/WillBrinson/status/1186477232585433088
So how did the Patriots burn so much time off the clock?
After the Patriots were tackled in-bounds on a third-and-9 play, the play clock started to run at the 11:04 mark. From there, Belichick decided to let the play clock run out, which took the game clock down from 11:04 to 10:23. At that point, Jets coach Adam Gase declined the delay of game penalty, which means the Patriots were given a new play clock -- this time, just 25 seconds -- and once again, the game clock started to run.
Just as the new play clock got to one second, Brandon Bolden jumped before the ball was snapped, which led to a false start penalty. On the play, it was pretty clear that Bolden jumped on purpose, and if you need proof, just look at the huge smile on his face after the flag was thrown. No one on a Belichick-coached team would smile like that after being penalized unless Belichick asked them to do it.
After the false start was called, Gase once again declined the penalty, which means the Patriots were once again given a new 25-second play clock. Patriots punter Jake Bailey didn't actually end up kicking the ball until the 9:43 mark, and after the Jets fair catch, New York's offense didn't take the field until the clock was down to 9:37, which means Belichick's plan resulted in a full 1:27 being run off the clock.
If the clock stopped after an offensive penalty -- whether it gets declined or not -- the Patriots wouldn't have been able to do this, but the clock kept running after each penalty got declined, which is why Belichick had his team get penalized twice.
Although the lost time didn't really matter to the Jets in this game, because they were being blown out, it could have mattered in a closer game, which is why Belichick thinks the NFL might end up closing this loophole in the NFL rulebook. As a matter of fact, it almost sounds like Belichick exploited the rule so the NFL would close it.
"That's probably a rule, a loophole that will be closed, and probably should be closed, but right now it's open," Belichick said this week.
Of course, as things currently stand, what the Patriots did was legal and Belichick is someone who's always looking to exploit the rule book.
"It was just the way the rules are set up," Belichick said Monday. "We were able to run quite a bit of time off the clock without really having to do anything."
Basically, this is just more proof that Belichick is always five moves ahead of anyone he's coaching against.
