End of half clock management

[Eich]

Why is Ben so anxious to "clock" the ball in the hurry-up? Why "clock" the ball and lose a down instead of using up all your timeouts at the end of the first half??? We lost one more chance to go for a TD instead of a FG at the end of the first half. Seems to me that when you're trying to preserve the clock, you should use timeouts first and then "clock" the ball only if you have to. I guess they like to have a timeout in case someone does something stupid and they need to stop the clock to kick a FG on 4th down. But keeping the timeout in your pocket in the case of stupidity gives you one less chance to throw into the EZ.

[JUST-PLAIN-NASTY]

Why is Ben so anxious to "clock" the ball in the hurry-up? Why "clock" the ball and lose a down instead of using up all your timeouts at the end of the first half??? We lost one more chance to go for a TD instead of a FG at the end of the first half. Seems to me that when you're trying to preserve the clock, you should use timeouts first and then "clock" the ball only if you have to. I guess they like to have a timeout in case someone does something stupid and they need to stop the clock to kick a FG on 4th down. But keeping the timeout in your pocket in the case of stupidity gives you one less chance to throw into the EZ.

You do like to have that timeout in case of a sack. The other think to consider on clocking the ball is many times it is done to change out personnel without using a timeout. Sometimes that is far more important in hurry up then running another play.

[snarky]

I've not understood this for a few years. JPN raises a good point about changing personnel. But you would think that at some point it would be worth the extra five seconds to run a play. I think we are (in general) to eager to clock it. I trace it back to the Ravens game in (I think) 2008 when Holmes caught the ball at the goal line and basically the game was decided in the review booth.

IIRC, in that game we probably should have clocked it (I forget the sequence exactly) and since then we have 'over-clocked' (waves to computer nerds) it a bit.