Dear Mike McCarthy,

So you never considered letting the Bears score? With under 2 minutes to play and only 1 timeout? That makes you an idiot.

Look, some things are debatable, but this is not one of them. All morning on the radio, on the internet, and in the real paper I’ve read about the “debate” of whether you should let the other team score in this situation, but those people are all idiot pundits (and by the way, shame on Wayne Larivee for ducking the question on the radio this morning). You coach a professional football team, and your job is to win games. By not allowing the Bears to score, you completely destroyed your team’s admittedly small chance of winning. Don’t believe me? Let’s do some math.

Robbie Gould has been in the league for 5 years, and in that time he has attempted 210 kicks of less than 30 yards (180 PATs and 30 FGs). He has missed exactly once, on a PAT 5 years ago. The odds of Robbie Gould missing the field goal that you were counting on him to miss are so close to 0 as to basically be 0. By giving the Bears a field goal with less than 10 seconds remaining you essentially conceded the game.

If you allow the Bears to score (which, by the way, they were stupidly attempting to do) you find yourself down 7 with about 1:45 to go, with the ball probably around the 20 yard line. I can’t seem to find the exact statistic, but if memory serves I believe an average NFL team scores a touchdown when starting from their own 20 yard line about 1/6 (or about 15%) of the time. I’m sure you have someone who can tell you the exact statistic since you coach an actual NFL football team and presumably employ people to keep this information. If I happen to be off by a few percentage points you can just plug in your numbers.

With a timeout and 1:45 to go, I don’t really think the clock would be much of a factor, but just to make you feel better we will ding them 5% and say that the Packers have about a 10% chance of scoring upon getting the ball back. Should they manage to score they would then need to either go for 2 or win in overtime, both of which are roughly 50/50 propositions.

All in all, if you allow the Bears to score your odds of winning the game go from 0, to about 5-7.5%. Your odds aren’t great, but the smart way is at least possible.

You are terrible at managing the clock. You should hire someone just to manage the clock for you so that you don’t look like such a moron. Please address this before the end of the season. This isn’t rocket science, it’s basically telling time. I have more complaints about the game, but again, there is a right and a wrong answer on this issue, and on this issue you are even stupider than Mike and Mike, and they are, as far as I can tell, the two dumbest people in the world.

Sincerely,

Paul Noonan