‘It Is F---ing Chaos’: How NFL Teams Prepare for Clock-Management Situations

Commanders coach Dan Quinn knew.

He had two new coordinators with no NFL play-calling experience (and just one year between them even at the college level). He had a young quarterback, coming back from injury. He had a top-10 pick at middle linebacker, a rookie who’d wind up wearing the green dot on his helmet as the defensive signal-caller.

So he loaded practice with game situations. They went 11-on-11 seemingly nonstop. Most of it was done in what are termed “call-it” periods, where the coordinators go against each other without a practice script, calling the offense and defense to the situation and the opponent. The idea: Get OC David Blough, DC Daronte Jones, QB Jayden Daniels, MLB Sonny Styles and the team acclimated for the challenge ahead.

Perhaps that would explain why the usually uber-positive Quinn went with the two-handed spike of his headset on Sunday, in reaction to the clock running down to all zeroes in overtime. After Rachaad White ran off right guard to bleed the clock, Daniels let it run down from 51 seconds to 12, snapping the ball with three seconds left on the play clock. He then ran into the line, hit the deck with eight seconds to go and laid there for three more.

You know the rest.

“No doubt, Dan Quinn went over that,” another head coach in the league said this week. “That is 100% the quarterback’s fault. But the head coach, that’s what we get paid for.”

Of course, Quinn was never going to say that about Daniels. Nor should he. He is indeed paid to fall on such swords. And the reality is, for all the work that these guys do … stuff happens.

It happened, in fact, to Washington before. In December 2015, Kirk Cousins, then in his fourth year, and known for his cerebral style of play, lost his head at the end of the first half of a game against the Eagles. With six seconds left, and Washington up 16–10, the ref wound the clock after a defensive penalty. Cousins, with young OC Sean McVay on the headset, took the snap and, rather than spiking the ball to stop the clock, took a knee.

Washington still won 38–24 to clinch the NFC East that day. So, less was made of it than Daniels’s gaffe on Sunday—it became a blooper and a teaching point, rather than a reason to schedule TV segments around a coach’s job security. Still, the premise was the same. McVay and Jay Gruden surely worked with Cousins on such circumstances in 2015, just as Quinn and his young staff tried to make triple-sure his players were ready for situations this summer.

But in the end, Quinn’s hands weren’t on the ball, nor were Blough’s, nor the team’s new game-management coordinator Connor Nickol’s. Daniels’s were. And getting guys like Daniels ready for those moments is more detailed and complex than ever.

When clock management used to be common sense

There was a moment in a game a little while back where the complexity of an NFL game-management apparatus came to a head. The clock was ticking. The offense had time to run one more play as it hustled to the line. The coordinator was in the booth, prepared to call a play with two out-breaking routes, and to instruct the quarterback to take one of the two or fire the ball into the third row. Either way, a game-winning field goal attempt was coming.

Then, the voices started chiming in.

From the headset. From the other coaches in the booth. Tick … tick … tick …

The call got in, but it came late. The operation on the field, as a result, was rushed. The center snapped the ball early. The quarterback fumbled. The defense recovered. The game was lost. The head coach was furious. A few days later, another coach stuck up for the coordinator, explaining to the boss the chaos that had ensued above the action.

This is a very different world than the one coaches used to live in. When 16-millimeter film was used, the term “cutting tape” wasn’t a figure of speech—young coaches actually had to do that while cutting their teeth. When the transition was made to VHS tapes, making cutups became a little easier, but was still laborious. High school coaches, for example, had to meet opponents at highway exits to trade the physical tapes just to prepare.

So situational football was less complicated back then because it had to be.

One decorated, retired NFL coach told me that, in those years, he had an assistant—usually an older, experienced guy—assigned to look at every game every week to find a handful of unique situations that he could war game with his staff in situational meetings, something that was a bit novel at the time, and the birth of everything on this front that was to come. Then, on game day, he’d have one assistant, generally a battle-tested offensive guy, help with the clock.

“I always had somebody, I thought, had a lot of common sense on both sides of the ball. So, Hey, if you see something, I want your opinion right away, right now, offense, defense and special teams,” the coach said this week. “It was the guys that I trusted the most, that I thought they could look at a replay. I wanted people that could look at replay. And some guys couldn’t, so you couldn’t always pick the perfect guy, because he might be on the sideline, and not the press box.

“But I would try to get people that I knew had a lot of common sense and had been in that scenario many times.”

He added that while his team had charts on when to go for two, and rules for time in two-minute offense, “At the same time, it was a feel thing. At the end of the day, we had so many charts, we’d study them, but to be honest with you, most of it was common sense.”

So it was that 12 years ago, Bill Belichick quietly stalked the sideline during Super Bowl XLIX, with the clock running down. His assistants were in his ear, but he wasn’t listening. He was looking across the field, at the Seahawks’ sideline. “And when I looked over there, I don’t know,” Belichick told NFL Films in 2025, “something just didn’t look right.”

He had all the information, and statistics, but he also knew there were human beings on the other side of the field, same as the human beings he was trying to coach. He let the clock run, going against the premise that he could call timeouts to preserve his chance to come back if Seattle scored a touchdown. He thought his opponent might be drowning in the moment, and he didn’t want to inadvertently resuscitate them with a chance to breathe.

So he tuned out everyone on the headset. Focusing on what was happening on the field, rather than on some chart, he tried to feel the moment he was in. The clock drained. Russell Wilson threw his infamous pick to Malcolm Butler. The Patriots were champions for a fourth time.

How teams prepare for end-of-game situations

That strategy from Belichick wasn’t the end result of doing everything by feel.

In fact, his Patriots would do more than just about anyone when it came to situational football. Bill O’Brien arrived as a quality-control assistant to work for Belichick in 2007. Leading up to Super Bowl XLII, with New England at 18–0, he was assigned to make sure the team didn’t miss any situational tendency the Giants had.

“I mean, this took me forever,” O’Brien said. “And so, it was everything from some type of onside kick situation, to fourth-down situations, obviously two-minute, four-minute, fourth down. Fourth-and-1, what did they do? Fourth-and-2-to-5, what did they do? I would put a huge tape together, and he would show that to the team over the course of the two weeks, getting ready for the game.”

Technology, over the years, has made that practice easier and easier. And as it has, the information’s become more voluminous. There’s less of a need to have an actual person go through all of it, when a couple of buttons can pull everything up. So now, there’s more situational data and more analytics, but perhaps less depth to how it’s acquired.

All of it goes into the situational work that’s done by NFL teams during the week.

One AFC team, during its week-opening Wednesday walkthrough, bakes situational football in. Four seconds left, we’re on the 20, offense needs a touchdown, what are we calling on offense, what are we calling on defense? 

Then, Thursday morning, before walkthrough, the head coach gathers his coordinators and select other coaches for a situational meeting, where they go through things like third-down, fourth-down and two-minute strategy for the week, and the opponents’ tendencies situationally (including things like where their field goal line is). Then they go through situational decision making around the league from the week before, and challenge each other on what they would’ve done in those situations.

Then, on Friday, the team works heavily on the red zone in practice. And the Saturday walkthrough/mock game is spent primarily prepping the team for situational strategy.

Another AFC team does full-speed end-of-half two-minute on Wednesday, and full-speed end-of-game on Thursday. Then, on Thursday night, the game-management coordinator goes through key situational decision making from around the NFL, ahead of a Friday meeting he leads to educate the players on such situations, as well as rules questions that may have come up during the week, and points of emphasis from the league.

That’s after training camp practices, which are chock-full of these sorts of situational lessons to give the players a proper baseline for the season.

“After basically the third or fourth practice of training camp, you’re gonna have some type of either a two-minute drill or a four-minute drill, where you have the lead or some type of overtime drill, or obviously special teams. You have a checklist of special team situations that you’re working, what we call a Toro field goal [a rushed situation], you’re working that,” said O’Brien, who was the Texans’ head coach for seven seasons and is now the head coach at Boston College. “All these, you’re working that from practice four all the way through practice 30 before your first game. You’re doing something, probably multiple things, one or two things per day, the rest of your training camp.

“And then during the week, like what we do, and we did this in New England, too, we did this in Houston, like the first practice of the week—so for us at BC, it’s Sunday—we’re gonna work a two-minute drill, a four-minute, we’re gonna work some situations, special team situations early in the week, and then we’re gonna work situations on Thursday. So in pro football, you would work situations on Wednesday, and then you would definitely work situations on Friday.

“From some type of a two-minute drill, or sometimes, even at Alabama, Coach [Nick] Saban would yell out, All right, we got the lead; there’s a minute 30 left, and they’ve got one timeout; we’re gonna run the football, make them use the timeout; then we gotta gain a first down; we gotta decide what to do on third down; we gotta run it, or throw it. All those things that come up. And it’s hard, because sometimes things come up in the game you haven’t practiced.”

But the idea, generally, is to prepare them for those situations and give them the sort of mental agility they’ll need to adjust on the fly for the unforeseen.

And then there are the rules that coaches have from years of experience. There’s the old 17-second rule, for running a play in bounds without a timeout. Another well-worn one passed around the NFL is to wait until there’s a minute left to start calling timeouts if you’ve got three, until 45 seconds left if you’ve got two, and 30 seconds left if you’ve got one, in the two-minute drill. Another, on the defensive side, is to count a second for every yard. So if an offense has more yards to go than seconds left, a DC calls it more conservative. If they have more seconds than yards, they’d be more aggressive.

What it’s like with multiple voices in the headset

Part of this new era’s challenge is created by the efficiency with which the information travels. O’Brien, for example, gets the outsourced CAI Analytics Strategy report every week, which plucks situations from around 15 college games and five pro games each week—the first week of October had everything from Cowboys-Texans and Idaho–Montana State, too. He then matches the film with the report, and he and his BC staff discuss them in their game-management meetings.

The issue, then, as more information becomes available, is synthesizing it, with so many barriers to acquiring it removed, and then deploying it on game day.

That’s where the question arises of how many voices should be in the head coach’s ear on Sundays. Most coaches say it should only be one or two. Two head coaches I spoke with had an analytics director and an offensive assistant as the two on the headset when it comes to game management. Another has his game-management coordinator alone. O’Brien, at BC, has former Browns head coach Rob Chudzinski and offensive analyst Andrew Breiner as his guys.

Chudzinski is on the sideline, and Breiner is on the headset, and that both have NFL experience is by design, since game management is emphasized to the nth degree in the pros.

“You’re never gonna be able to cover every situation,” O’Brien said. “Generally speaking, you have to understand, O.K., there’s less than 50 seconds to go, you have one timeout; we’re down a field goal; how are we gonna handle this? You can definitely overdo it. You can overthink it.”

The play clock provides governance over any discussion that can take place—and is also where coaching staffs can get themselves tied in a knot at the worst possible time.

There are 40 seconds on it in the NFL. But for the good of the players, to get the call to them in time to avoid a rushed, panicked situation, clearly getting them the play call early enough is important. And the headset to the quarterback cuts off at 15 seconds.

How the 25 seconds before that are used is, of course, vital. And sometimes, like in a two-minute situation, they actually have less than that to relay the call to the players.

“You want to have a lot of clarity, for sure,” said one head coach. “There’s no doubt. And that’s where it’s just like, you got to stay calm in those situations. Like, We practice it. We’ve been here. We good? Yeah, we’re good.”

Unfortunately, as more people have gotten involved, with the rise in analytics across the NFL, the more potential there is for a crash out—when folks hired for expertise in these areas and coaches alike are trying to be heard at the most critical time.

The other underlying piece is the value some teams put in analytics, because their owners want that. The reasons why are easy to understand. A lot of owners want their teams to be cutting edge, so they invest in those areas. Also, the analysts make a sport that can be difficult for outsiders to understand more accessible to a businessman—in the same sort of way a PFF subscription can make how a team’s right guard is playing accessible for a fan.

So you have what the numbers say. You have what the experienced coaches’ knowhow and instincts say. And the result, if it’s not all organized correctly, can be catastrophic.

“Yeah, it’s chaos,” said another head coach, about such situations that aren’t routine, but can arise. “The coordinator’s gotta have discipline. I mean, it is f---ing chaos. It’s like, Everyone, shut the f--- up. [Pro Football Talk’s Mike] Florio had a good one—they should black box the headsets. You could make a movie off of that s---.”

The coach then added that the one thing that shouldn’t have ever changed, as the access to data around game management has, is that access to the head coach on the topic should be very limited—“It’s one voice that’s the person you’ve been communicating with all week that you need to communicate with.”

Whom head coaches turn to for advice

The retired coach’s words—“it was the guys that I trusted most”—ring true in the way many of these roles have been filled over the years. Belichick entrusted his old prep-school friend from Phillips Andover, Ernie Adams, to lead game management for him. In Houston, O’Brien had childhood friend John Perry, whom he’s known since the two were 8 years old, do it.

Patriots coach Mike Vrabel initially worked with John Streicher when Streicher was a student assistant at Ohio State, made him chief of staff when he got the Titans’ job, had him take on game management there, and brought him to New England as one of his first hires when he got to Foxborough. Dan Quinn worked for Joe Gardi as a Hofstra assistant in the 1990s, got to know his son Dave there, and wound up plucking Gardi from the league office in 2024, to lead the Commanders’ game-management operation, when Quinn was first hired in Washington.

And the value teams put in the role is certainly reflected, too, in that executive types are now filling them—it’s not just some offensive assistant with nothing to do on game day.

Eagles assistant GM Jon Ferrari, whom the team poached from the league office, handles it for Nick Sirianni. And Gardi and Streicher were hired to do a whole lot more than just manage games. Gardi’s title in Washington was senior vice president of football initiatives, before he was hired away earlier this year to be the Titans’ EVP of football operations. Streicher, meanwhile, was brought aboard in 2025 as the Pats’ VP of football operations and strategy.

The reality is there’s no cookie-cutter path to the job—the Falcons, under Arthur Smith, quietly put Matt Schaub in the role for a year when the former Pro Bowl quarterback was first exploring coaching—because it takes command through a wide swath of situations, rules and pressure points.

Still, all of them, in the end, at least to some degree, are at the mercy of the wildly-talented 20-somethings that are carrying the ball, and circumstances that are ever changing. No matter how much work or diligence you’ve done.

“So it’s like, All right, we’re gonna have to execute this when the game is on the line, let’s just all make sure we are dialed in and understanding,” said another longtime head coach. “And you could have a quarterback who was not even on your roster when you went through it, he comes in, like, say, J.J. McCarthy’s playing for the Giants in a couple weeks. Well, we went through this in spring and again in training camp, but he never got it there and it comes up and he’s like, Holy crap.

“That’s huge. It’s not only knowing the playbook obviously, but knowing what you call it, what’s the situation called? There’s a one-word type situation. Hey, Toro Toro Toro. Whatever it is. Everybody clicks into what it is.”

So, then, who’d be to blame in the Washington situation?

“I don’t know if we’ll ever know,” the coach answered. “You can, as a head coach, say all the right things. But at the end of the day, if he doesn’t do it, you can’t out him.”

What you can do, of course, is review what went wrong, something the Commanders did this week, as they cleared the wreckage of the end of the Giants game.

One thing that was clear: It didn’t happen for a lack of trying. The same way a Sirianni decision Sunday, on a kickoff, failed despite the Eagles’ coach being maniacal on situational ball—according to those who’ve been around him— Quinn’s team faltered in the big moment hours later, despite having an entire camp built on handling these in-game situations.

So much so, in fact, that over the course of camp, Quinn had the play clock for the aforementioned 11-on-11 work start at 38 seconds, rather than the normal 40, to speed up his players a bit, so they’d be more comfortable in the chaos of a game.

Daniels is smart. He didn’t forget the lessons learned. The work was done.

Sometimes, stuff happens.