There were many mistakes that the Detroit Lions made on Sunday night that contributed to the team blowing a three-score lead in the second half to the San Francisco 49ers, but the biggest one happened toward the end of the fourth quarter when head coach Dan Campbell failed to retain all of his timeouts.
The Lions called a running play on third-and-goal while down 10 points with under a minute remaining on the clock and didn’t convert for a touchdown. As a result, the team called a timeout to preserve time before the fourth-down call, meaning the Lions would not be able to stop the clock on defense and would need an extremely unlikely onside kick to keep their hopes alive.
After the game, head coach Dan Campbell admitted this was a massive mistake, saying that he probably should have thrown the ball so if it was incomplete, the clock would have stopped.
“Yeah, look the easy thing to do is to throw it,” Campbell said according to MLive.com. “Probably should’ve been the right thing, but for me, I wanted to run it. I thought we would just pop it. We had just [run the 2-minute offense] all the way down the field, throwing the football, and they were in a four-down front and I believed we’d walk right in. And we just missed a block. So then, yeah, I’ve got to use a timeout. So, hindsight, throw it four times. But I believed in that moment it was going to be a walk-and-run, and it didn’t work out. So, I gambled and lost.”
It could have been the difference in the game.
