If a receiver can run 40 yrds in 5 seconds, you can hit him at the goal line with 9 seconds left. In theory, they'd stop the clock within a second of an incompletion. My scenario is a lot less flawed than Barney McBarnyard's. I don't think there's another coach in the pros stupid enough to try that play - and apparently, Choke ran the play they all agreed on. Huh? Earlier in the game, one of those referees fucked us on another snap count, so you sure don't want to trust them to get it right.
Which brings me to a bigger point, The NFL with its 40-second clock and not stopping the clock after a first down or after a long pass play late in the game, is an inferior product that is only appreciated by fans too young to know how infinitely more exciting it was before the rule changes. You may think it's exciting now, but all I can say is it was a hell of a lot better before.
I mean, how many minutes would it add to the length of a game to do it right? Five? The five at the end, when the game has reached a fever pitch. Another thing I see the refs do is failure to give a runner credit when he drags one or two tacklers out of bounds to stop the clock (what an exciting play that is, yet those bastard refs will keep the clock running, so there's no time to stop and appreciate an amazing effort.) Sometimes he his dragging them back downfield slightly, but as far as I'm concerned his fucking forward motion is wherever the hell he wants it to be.
When it was a thirty second clock (or 25, I forget which) the kind of last ditch effort we saw yesterday was commonplace, because one team could not kill an entire 2 minute period. In every close game, the losing team always had a desperation 4th down play where everything was on the line, and the ball was turned over, but if they'd saved their time outs, they would get one last shot, just like we saw yesterday, with 20 or thirty seconds on the clock -- commonplace in the 70s.
Basically the league is run by brain dead morons who don't give a fuck about the game, just the money - perhaps like Jerry Jones.
Compare the NFL's amateurish game management to pro baseball playoffs, when fans might be on the edge of their seat for fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty minutes without a single commercial. the NFL is a subpar product. If fans got together, they could demand more.