Peter King reviews the last playoff games and previews the next set

‘An Absolute Aorta-Smasher’

Wild-card weekend felt that way in Minnesota, where the Vikings had their hearts stomped in the final seconds. Reviewing what went down in road wins by the Chiefs, Steelers, Seahawks and Packers, previewing the divisional round and more on the L.A. vote and the coaching carousel

By Peter King

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/01/10/blair-walsh-minnesota-vikings-nfl-playoffs-wild-card

From Duluth west to Moorhead, from Warroad up near the Manitoba border south to Albert Lea, on the road to Iowa, the good people of Minnesota are in pain this morning. That is nothing compared to the pain of Blair Walsh. After the worst moment of Walsh’s professional life Sunday afternoon, he answered question after question about it, for 12 minutes or so in the Vikings’ locker room. Then Walsh sat at his locker.

And he started to cry, and couldn’t stop even when teammates came over and tried to tell him it’d be okay.

I texted Paul Allen, the Vikings’ fine play-by-play man who loves the franchise like few announcers love their teams, an hour after Seattle 10, Minnesota 9, and asked him if he could call me. “I cried,” he texted back.

I wanted to hear Allen’s call of the fateful play, which was on Deadspin. I clicked.
“Walsh, from 27 yards, left hash … snap good, ball down …” Allen, so anticipatory. Breathless.

“WALSH’S KICK IS UP AND IT IS … NOGOODHEMISSEDIT!!!”

Allen in stunned disbelief.

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME! THE SEASON CAN’T END LIKE THAT!!! He missed it left!”

Allen trying to take it in, words coming out like lava.

And then, reality. Professionalism. Flatlined words. Just the facts.

“And the Seattle Seahawks are off to Charlotte. Blair Walsh missed a 27-yard field goal and the Minnesota Vikings are going to lose 10 to 9.”

Sunday night, on the phone, Allen said, “It’s an absolute aorta-smasher. Do you realize before that kick, NFL kickers had attempted 191 field goals of 27 yards or less this year—and made 189 of them? That kick was a 99 percent lock. This is the kicker who led the NFL in field goals made this year. He already made three in this game. I mean, people didn’t have high expectations coming into this game, but when you’re a 27-yard kick away from advancing to play Arizona …”

“What’s worse?” I wondered. “This game or the Favre championship game six years ago?”
“The ’09 game,” Allen said. “Brett Favre in purple and gold, two minutes away from taking the Vikings to the Super Bowl? Huge. But this is second. For sure.”

Watching the kick over and over, it’s clear that, as in golf, bad things happen when you try too hard, and bad things happen when you try to kill the ball.

Bad things, as in hurrying your stride and hooking the ball—both of which Walsh did. The snap was fine, the hold was fine (except for the part about the laces being in the wrong place at the time of Walsh’s kick), but the kick was way left, hitting the net to the outside of the left upright. Replays showed fans in despair. Walsh wanted to get it over with, so he began to address the media as soon as they were let into the Minnesota locker room.

“It was so quick I have no idea what happened,” he said. “You have to look back at the film, but I can tell you this: It is my fault. It didn’t feel good off my foot and I kind of knew right away.”

Speculation flew that because Walsh kicked the ball on the laces, it affected the trajectory of the ball and made it fly errantly. I called a veteran special teams coach, Mike Westhoff, now retired, and asked him about it. “You’re supposed to kick with the laces facing out,” Westhoff said. “That makes the ball go straight. But on a kick that short, it’s not going to affect it much. I feel terrible for Blair. He messed it up. He was fast. He hooked it, just like a golfer pulling across the ball. He just mis-hit it. A shame.”

“It is shameful,” Walsh said. “I just didn’t put a swing on it that would be acceptable by anybody’s standards. I worked real hard to get myself to a place where I was very consistent for this team all year, and in that moment, the moment they needed me the most this year, I wasn’t, and that stings. I’ll be working hard to erase that from my career, but it will take a while.”

Not much anyone can say to Walsh. He knows what his miss cost a locker room and a city, and time’s all that can help now.

* * *

News item: About that Adam Jones penalty in Cincinnati … Steelers linebackers coach Joey Porter, who caused the crucial unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty on Jones to happen in the final seconds Saturday night, should not have been on the field at the time. The league allows medical personnel and the head coach to be on the field; the reason Porter wasn’t shooed away, I am told, is that there was real concern for Antonio Brown as he lay on the ground after the hit from Vontaze Burfict that generated the first 15-yard flag on the play. Without the flag on Jones, the Steelers would have been at the Cincinnati 32 with no timeouts and 18 seconds left.

With the flag on Jones, they were in position to try a 35-yard field goal by Chris Boswell. It was good, and Pittsburgh won 18-16. So, two issues here: Porter, from replays, was hanging around the Cincinnati defensive players at one point, which absolutely should have been policed by the officiating crew on hand. One former coach who faced Porter and the Steelers several times said Sunday he was one of the best players in the league at saying incendiary things to opponents and hoping they’d pop off and get a penalty.

After the game, Jones told Mike Silver of NFL Network: “He ain’t supposed to be on the [expletive] field! He was talking all kinds of [expletive], yelling at [Burfict], saying, ‘You a dirty son of a b—- … Take your b—- a– out of here …’ ” When Jones tried to get at Porter—stupidly, of course—Jones jostled field judge Buddy Horton, who threw the flag on him. If Porter was doing the trolling that Jones described on the field, he should have been flagged first, because he wasn’t supposed to be out there in the first place.

But Jones in that situation had to be smart enough to walk away, and he wasn’t. The league has been telling officials to cut down on the offsetting penalties, to flag the instigator in cases where the two sides are both wrong. In this case, if Jones is correct in what he says about Porter, I believe Porter got away with instigating this.

News item: So many other things from the Cincinnati debacle. I don’t see Cincinnati owner Mike Brown firing Marvin Lewis. Brown is not a knee-jerk owner; he’s more likely to be content with making the playoffs for five straight years for the first time in franchise history than he is to be in a firing mood because his team imploded at the end of this game. Remember that Lewis is the kind of coach Brown wants. The Bengals take chances on incendiary devices like Burfict, and Lewis keeps the lid on them (mostly) and gets production out of them.

But the deal with the devil blew up in their faces in the final minute Saturday, with Burfict’s cheap-shot penalty inciting the mob scene … Burfict was already on notice from the league for a worse hit on Maxx Williams of the Ravens away from the ball in Week 17. I will be stunned if Burfict is not suspended for at least one game at the start of the 2016 season … No NFL team has such a drought in playoff wins as Cincinnati does.

The Bengals last won a playoff game in 1990. Here’s how long ago that was: The playoff win was over the Houston Oilers. The next week, in Los Angeles, Bo Jackson suffered a hip injury that ended his football career and led to the end of his athletic career.

News item: The Browns are not one big happy family. In their closing meeting with team brass, the outgoing Cleveland staff was told the team would not foot the bill for them to network and try to get jobs at the Senior Bowl. And the coaches were told they would not be allowed to purchase their two Super Bowl tickets, a perk of being an NFL player or coach, which they were under the impression they’d be allowed to do. So when those two bits of information were dropped on the coaches, most of whom have one more year left on their contracts, they were not pleased.

The Browns have many issues as they look for a new coach and general manager while building an organizational structure different from that of any other team. I’ve talked to many people around the league in the last few days about Cleveland hiring club attorney Sashi Brown as the executive vice president of football operations and Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer of the team.

The overriding thought, from one veteran personnel executive: “They better be absolutely sure they find a coach and GM who buy into the culture they’re building there, or this will be another Cleveland train wreck. Personally I think it’s innovative and pretty smart. But it only works if the coach you’re bringing in is open-minded.” In the coming days I’ll write about how football people should not be afraid of analytics.

The divisional round: I see zero locks

We’ve just finished the first playoff weekend in NFL history in which all four road teams won. And though I can’t see it happening again this weekend—Arizona can’t lose to the resurgent Pack, right?—I think we could go four-for-four for competitive games. The matchups:

SATURDAY

No. 5 Kansas City (12-5) at No. 2 New England (12-4), 4:35 p.m. ET (CBS)
Intriguing game. The Chiefs have won 11 straight, by an average of 16.4 points, while New England finished the season on a downer, losing four of six. It looked like New England was coasting to the finish line, though; the Patriots’ Week 17 game against Miami was one of the strangest attempts at barely trying in a regular season game in years. The offensive line needs to be better, and healthier, for the Patriots to make a seventh Super Bowl in the Belichick/Brady Era.

But the K.C. Express might be flawed in Foxboro. Jeremy Maclin, who has 90 catches this year, suffered a high ankle sprain in the win over the Triple-A Texans, and it’s not known if he’ll play. Lucky for Alex Smith that young receivers Chris Conley and Albert Wilson are becoming impact players. Smith will need Conley and Wilson to make plays if Kansas City is to have a chance to make its first AFC title game in 22 years.

No. 5 Green Bay (11-6) at No. 2 Arizona (13-3), 8:15 p.m. ET (NBC)
New life for the Packers. Did you see how many times FOX caught Aaron Rodgers smiling Sunday evening at Washington? I mean, “one” would have been a massive increase over recent weeks. Sunday was the first time all season that Randall Cobb and Davante Adams scored touchdowns in the same game, and Green Bay had two rushing touchdowns too. Also notable was the amount of TV time the young defensive backs got against Kirk Cousins. Green Bay opened in nickel and played a total of nine defensive backs in the game.

Expect more of the same in Arizona on Saturday night. When the two teams met in Glendale two weeks ago, Arizona built a 31-0 lead after 26 minutes and generally had its way with the Packers. The Cardinals have so many weapons, and rested ones. But the trip to Landover breathed life into Rodgers, and I expect the game to be much more competitive than the last meeting.

SUNDAY

No. 6 Seattle (11-6) at No. 1 Carolina (15-1), 1:05 p.m. ET (FOX)
Four regular-season meetings between the Pete Carroll Seahawks and the Ron Rivera Panthers. Seattle by 4 in 2012. Seattle by 5 in 2013. Seattle by 4 in 2014. Carolina by 4 this season. What’s always interesting in a divisional-round game is how the two teams enter in different states. Seattle comes off an emotional firestorm of a North Pole game in Minnesota, then travels for a second straight game at 10 a.m. PT.

Carolina has been able to get extra rest for Ted Ginn Jr. (knee), who missed Week 17, and with two of the top four corners (Bene Benwikere and Charles Tillman) out for the year, Josh Norman and Cortland Finnegan will have to be every-down factors against Russell Wilson. Wilson versus Cam Newton should be appointment TV for the next decade in the NFL, and the best man will be the winner Sunday.

No. 6 Pittsburgh (11-6) at No. 1 Denver (12-4), 4:40 p.m. (CBS)
Speaking of beat-up teams, we give you the Pittsburgh Steelers, who enter the week with their three most important offensive players in uncertain physical condition. Ben Roethlisberger (shoulder) told offensive coordinator Todd Haley not to call any deep passes when he re-entered Saturday night’s prize fight with the Bengals, and though no one can imagine Roethlisberger sitting out the Denver game, he won’t be healthy for it. Antonio Brown is in the concussion protocol, though he told teammates he was fine in the locker room Saturday night.

And DeAngelo Williams (right foot sprain) is iffy. Peyton Manning, on the other side, was extremely lucky to get the extra rehab time on a plantar-fascia-addled foot that still vexes him. Any game that might be Peyton Manning’s last is must-see TV—and I have no idea if he’ll play next year or not, but at 39 with the kind of physical problems Manning has had, you always have to think a January game could be his last. I think this game turns on Roethlisberger’s ability to cut it loose. The Broncos are a terrific run-defense team, so if the Steelers can’t use their deep threats, it’s hard to imagine them making enough plays to win.