Autopsying the ending: Who is to blame for the Saints not getting a pass off on last play?

Time in football is a funny thing.

Four seconds, in almost any other setting, is not much time. You couldn’t feel your phone ring, pull it out of your pocket, read the caller ID and answer it inside of four seconds. But in football, four seconds is an eternity. A quarterback with four seconds in the pocket might be the only four seconds in the world that feels longer than waiting for your food to spend its last four seconds inside the microwave.

On Sunday, Derek Carr had four seconds. He had four seconds to stay alive against the Rams. And maybe it won’t make a difference, but beating the Rams could have changed things. It could have changed things for Darren Rizzi. It could have changed things for Klint Kubiak. It could have changed things for Derek Carr. But Carr spent the last four seconds watching his play cook in the microwave and couldn’t pop the door open before the buzzer went off and the Saints lost, 21-14.

What an absolutely brutal way to watch a brutal and boring and disappointing game end. For the most part, Sunday’s game felt dreary and dreadful, especially during the first half, when it felt like both teams played like they spent the week marinating in tryptophan — especially the Rams. New Orleans wasn’t much better, though. The Saints made plays and moved the ball but they couldn’t score and really take advantage of their advantages, ending the first half with six points despite holding the ball for nearly 19 minutes. And then in the second half, the Rams remembered they were playing the Saints and decided they were going to make New Orleans tackle and play coverage, and New Orleans couldn’t tackle or play coverage and surrendered 21 points.

And then the game came down to the final possession and Derek Carr stood at the 9-yard line on fourth-and-3 with 1:13 remaining and he took a sack. The game was over. But what happened?

I think there is absolutely one truth that everyone can agree upon: Carr didn’t need to take a sack. The sack should have been avoided. Who is to blame? That depends on your point of view.

Here’s how the play was designed: Well, we’ll never know for sure. The first play, or something about it or some element of it, got killed at the line of scrimmage. Carr got the team into something else.

Here’s how the second play was designed: Juwan Johnson (83) motioned from the left side of the formation to the right, to create a 3x1 formation with Foster Moreau (87) on one side, and Juwan, Dante Pettis (17) and Marquez Valdes-Scantling (10) lined up on the other side. Juwan and Pettis both ran routes to the end zone that broke toward the sideline, and MVS ran a curl. Foster stayed in to block Jared Verse and Alvin Kamara (41) was in protection in the backfield.

Let’s start with who isn’t to blame: Foster Moreau. The tight end still had his hands on Jared Verse, the Rams’ star rookie pass rusher, 3.5 seconds into the play and Verse didn’t actually put his hand on Carr’s arm until right around 4.1 seconds. Most plays take between 2.5 and 3 seconds when there is no play-action involved. Asking your blocking to hold up for much longer is a bit unreasonable. We can remove him from the equation. And given the length of time, it's even hard to argue with the protection that left him one-on-one with Verse, even if it wasn't an advantageous matchup. Moreau held up long enough.

So, that takes us to the play itself. There are two things to know here.

Everything in the play’s design is on the right side of the field.

The pressure comes from the left side.

That means that Carr never saw the pressure coming. He never even looks to that side of the field, and he shouldn’t have because everything was happening in front of him. The reason for pointing that out is to make it clear that Carr shouldn’t have seen the pressure. If he had, he wouldn’t have been doing his job. But vision is different than feel and awareness. We’ll get back to that in a second.

The Saints typically use pure progressions, which means the quarterback reads from one point to another point, progressing in order. And that appears to have happened here. It’s a little hard to judge without the All-22 view (we’ll get a closer look tomorrow) but it looks like MVS is the first read, Pettis is the second and Juwan is the third read.

It’s tough to say whether or not MVS gets open. He looks like he does at a certain point. The curl is there, maybe. Quentin Lake does a good job and is sitting between MVS and Pettis, so it would have have taken an aggressive throw, but Carr could have maybe taken a shot at getting the first down. But it’s hard to know when he moved to his next read and when that window opened. Given how Lake played it, the right move was probably to move on.

So that takes you to Read 3. Read 3 seems like it takes a little bit of time to open. I’ll caution again that I’m going off memory and what I could see on the TV replays, but it sure looks like Carr goes through his first two reads pretty quickly and is waiting on his third … and Juwan has his back to him for quite a while. So he waits on it. He waits on it … and gets sacked. Juwan does eventually get open. He goes to the back of the end zone and bumps safety Kamren Kinchens to the ground and breaks outside. But by then, the play is over. The route was covered well.

After the game, Carr said he wanted to throw a jump ball to Juwan but it just wasn’t there.

OK, so maybe we can say that route took a little while to get open and it should have happened faster. But what is Carr’s responsibility on the play? Four seconds is a long, loooooong time. And he just kind of … stands there. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t extend the play. He just waits. Maybe that’s the right thing to do. Maybe that’s how it’s coached. Maybe he should have waited because that gave him the best chance to make a play. I don’t know. I’m just someone who watches football, but it sure looked like the kind of play where you see other quarterbacks get out of the pocket and extend the play because they know it’s been too long. The coverage was good, nothing was there, you make something shake. Carr didn’t make something shake.

I asked him about this after the game. Here’s the exchange:

Me: “Is there anything that could have been done differently on that play?”

Derek: “My read was completely frontside. I mean, I will evaluate it. What could I do better? What could I have done? But I’m not looking that side. … My eyes are frontside, going through my read, trying to find the coverage and find the open guy. So, I had no idea. But still, I’ve got to figure out a way to help my teammates.”

Me: “When your read is over here and the pressure is over here, what can a quarterback do besides have an internal clock? Is there anything that can be done?”

Derek: “I just always want to put it on myself. That’s a tough one because it’s at the end of a game, the down and distance, you’re trying to take every last second. It’s not like some of the plays early in the game where someone lost or something like that and I just get out of there and throw it away to save a negative play.

“You can’t do that. You have to try. I’ll go study it and talk to my coaches. Whatever they say will work and I’ll try to be better. It’ll be in my brain for sure, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

“I don’t want to say there’s nothing I could ever do because I always want to think that there’s something I could have done better. I was just going through my read at the end, saw him and was to throw it and then he hit me.”

Me: At what point do you decide that I’m going to flee the pocket and extend? Is there a trigger in your head where you’re like, ‘All right, it’s been four seconds. I need to get out of here’?”

Derek: “It’s not really counting. It’s once you get through the read. I got through one and two pretty quick, and then I’m waiting on number three. The way they passed it off — I’m not going to talk about our whole read, but I went through one and two quick just because of how they played it. We knew those were dead. So you step up looking for three whenever my eyes went there. I waited until he was about to win and then went to throw it.

“So, I don’t know. It’s my fault, man. I just wish I could have got the ball off.”

I think it’s fair to say that someone didn’t get open the way they were supposed to. They lost their route. Nothing was there and, yes, it was a situation where something had to be there.

But I also think that it’s fair to say that maybe Carr should have gotten out of the pocket and extended the play instead of waiting on something. Not getting a throw off there is simply something that isn’t an option. Doesn’t matter what actually happened. Doesn’t matter who let you down. Quarterbacks are judged on moments like that, and the one thing that can’t happen is not getting a throw off.

Four seconds is a long time. Someone has to get open ... but you can't stand still and wait for something to happen.