A look into the NFL Playoffs and the upcoming Super Bowl

Joining us now on the Adam Gold show is from I'm going to have to let him tell me where Trey Wingo is from. He is an expert on the National Football League 33rd team and I'll let you fill in the blanks, sir. How are you? Hi, everybody. My name is Kevin Frazier. I do a show every Monday, but it's really a platform for people to express their opinions about sports.

We encourage you can download it at the App Store or Google Play. Also do some stuff for the PGA Tour working with NBC this summer, a little bit on some of their golf coverage and in just a little bit. I'm watching a new podcast with Amazon and wondering. With my old sports center co host Kevin Frazier called Alternate Routes, where we take one flash moment in time and see what happens there. What if Michael Jordan had missed the shot in 1982 and C double A championship game away? You're going there.

Yeah. What happens there? Does he crumble? Does he go to baseball and end up managing a quickie Mart and Patrick Ewing become the greatest college player of all time? Probably wins three championships.

Maybe that will overrun in 1985 doesn't materialize or 86. I think it was a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. And it's really going to be a lot of fun. All of that.

All of that is awesome. Trey Winger here. All right. So what if the Lions Dan Campbell had thrown the ball on third down? What if they had gone for it rather than kicked a field goal before the end of the first half? Because that game, regardless of how great it was that Dan Campbell made, which frankly feel goal or going for it in the second half. I didn't hate either decision. I understood why people did, but I didn't hate either one. I hated the first one. I hated the one in the first half because that's when you were dominating.

How did you see those? Well, first of all, you're exactly right. And I actually going to have the exact opposite opinion here. I thought what he did at the end of the half was perfect. I mean, if you remember a couple of years ago, the chiefs, the pipeline Kansas city chiefs against the Bengals in the AFC championship game, we're up 21 to 10, and they have chanting one more play without a timeout. You could get it in the end zone or kick up a field goal that would have put them up 14 points.

They go for it. Tyree kill is stopped. And that completely turned that entire game. And the Bengals have this unbelievable second half and going to beat them in overtime. If they just kicked that field goal, a field goal at the end of the game for the Chiefs would have won them. And then we're talking about maybe I'm going to their fifth straight Super Bowl.

Right? So, so, so I thought with a young team that has never been in the post season before, never been in this crucible before Dan did the prudent thing at the end of the half. Hey, we don't want to, we don't want to leave points on the field.

Let's take the points. We're up by 17 at the half. Oh, by the way, before Sunday in the history of conference championship games, no team had ever lost after being up by 17 and they were in the post season before. At the half history was on their side, right?

So I thought that was a prudent decision. Now we go to the second half 49 to start it, and they kick a field goal to cut it to 14. The line starts to drive to get out of a 28 yard line. You're now you're about halfway through the third quarter, right? It's fourth and two from the 20.

Michael Badgley is not Justin Tucker. He's a very good kicker. We're talking about a 45 yard field goal.

I'd say he makes those about 95% of the time. So what you do as a head coach, you have to understand this is what we always do. What's the best possible situation that I can put my team in?

And I would suggest very strongly that a team that had never been there before and was dealing with the moment. If you kick that field goal, you can say to them, guys, we're good, but half the third quarter, we still have our 17 point lead. So they miss, right? They don't make the completion and you can make the catch the argument that Reynolds should have caught it, but totally understand that. But now it's a huge momentum swing for San Francisco and you can feel it in the building.

And then what happens after that? The nine is from this 20, right? 20 up and run. There's the fumble.

There's more drop passes. Now the team is pressing. I would offer to you the most important thing a head coach can do is manage the moment and understand what is necessary at the time. And I think both of those times he should have kicked the field goal because now when you're down in the fourth quarter 2724 your seven point underdog on the road, you want to extend the game.

You need to stay in the game as long as possible. I would also have kicked the field goal there so we can say, Hey, guys, we had a terrible run. Guess what? If I would have told you at the start of the game with five minutes of play, it's all tied up. Would you take it?

Hell yeah, they would have taken it. So I think that Dan, who I think has done wonderful things for the Lions is going to be a great head coach for a long time. You know, the podcast you do with Chase Daniels, you got a thousand things. I appreciate the that you taking time and you're living my best life.

Almost wish I did it. Okay, so you and I disagree on all of the field on the field goals to me in the second half. The second one, the one that would have tied the game.

That is the one I thought. Okay, that's the one I would have taken if I was going to kick a field goal there, even though it was a 47 yarder. And by the way, in his career, he had only been with Detroit for a little bit in his career. It's probably closer to 75% between 40 and 49 regardless, but he hadn't. I don't think he had missed one with the Lions this year, but the the second, the second one would have got us even.

And at that point, no matter what San Francisco did, we would have had a chance to either tie or weave or win the game with the ball. That's all you want. That's all you want that. I just, I just, I just think, and then we can move on from this. I just think you have a young team.

Okay. And it's like Jimmy Johnson was great at this. Like he could read his team very well. Like when they were playing San Francisco and the second of their free straight.

And I see championship games when they're about to go back to Super Bowl 28. He can tell they were a little nervous, right? He could tell that the team, you know, they were defending Super Bowl champs out of the Leon, let Miami dolphins game, all that stuff.

You can tell they were low on edge. So we called a radio station in that house and said, Hey, don't worry about it. We're going to win the game.

Put it in big, bold headlines. We will win the game. And as players like hell yeah. Jerry, uh, Jimmy believes in us. We're good.

I think Dan Campbell would have done his team a great, great service by saying them guys take the field goal. 17 points. We're at 17 on the road. We were seven point underdogs. We only got a quarter and have to play.

Let's go. I just don't think he managed the team correctly. I don't think he managed this point either 28 to seven, because they were having so much success running the football 28 to seven is so much better and decisive than 24, 24 to seven. You're right. But the only thing I'll say is every decision you make, you have to, you have to incorporate the downside risk.

I agree. And he did it at the end of the half. He realized we can't walk away from here with no points because that would have been a disaster. And then on the other hand, on the other two decisions, he didn't think about the downside risk as a head coach. You don't have to think about he said, Well, I was confident we were going to make it. Yeah, of course you're always coming to make it, but you have to say to yourself, what if we don't? How does that affect the game? How does that affect my team?

And I think that's the mistake you made. Trey Wingo is joining us here on the Adam Gold show. All right. Andy Reed, Patrick Mahomes history. This is only the second time. I shouldn't I shouldn't say that because Buffalo and but this is the anniversary of the fourth consecutive Super Bowls. They are 13 the final score. They should have won the first one.

The other three. They were not. They were not the better team by any stretch of the imagination.

But anyway, they should have won the first one. But other than that, there's only two teams that have won that have been to the Super Bowl of four out of five years, New England and then Kansas City historical perspective on Mahomes and Andy Reed. And I think maybe Andy Reed more so than Mahomes since we have so much more history with Patty.

Yeah, I'll start with I'll start with Patrick because I'm Adam. I know you're a baseball guy and one of one of my favorite stats of all time is Derek Jeter's record in the postseason. For those that don't know when the when Derek was in his time playing with the Yankees in his career. Now this is a remarkable. He played 158 career post.

Okay. You're getting your top two and occasionally your third best starter. So you really get sort of premium in the postseason.

We all know this, right? So Gina's postseason numbers for 158 games, 308 average 20 home runs. 61 RBI 111 runs scored and 20 something stolen bases, which is a ridiculous for a season. That's an MVP. And he did that in the postseason.

Okay. Well, this was Patrick Mahomes 17th career playoff game. So essentially now Patrick Mahomes has played a full season of postseason games in the postseason with Patrick Mahomes as a quarterback.

The Chiefs are 14 and three. He's been responsible for 45 touchdowns versus only eight turnovers, a completion percentage of 67.5% and a passer rating of 106 point something. Now to put that in perspective, his passer rating in the regular season for his career is 92 point something.

Okay. So we're talking about a Derek Jeter type. We're talking about an escalation of talent against supposedly be much better teams that you are playing.

That's that's what we're seeing. Historically, Patrick Mahomes and you go look at the numbers from homes in his first six seasons as a starter, as opposed to Tom Brady's first six seasons as a starter. The only category in which Tom Brady has an advantage is that he won three Super Bowls in his first six years only went to three. Patrick is in his fourth and he has a chance to tie in his second season record postseason record touchdown to interception ratio passer rating. He is killing Tom Brady's numbers. So what we're seeing here is generational excellence. And I thought in the for Andy Reed, there's never been.

I have a lot of Philly fans like, well, how come he didn't do this in Philly? Because five ain't 15, right? Okay, as good as me as good as Donovan McNabb was right. Yeah, he's a really good quarterback. He ain't 15. And you know, he got them.

You know, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, he got in Philadelphia and 55 there and now six in in Kansas City. This is ridiculous. Yeah.

And you know, it's really the people. People always want to talk about the negative and we can do that. Why? Why did Dan Campbell make those decisions? Or why did the Ravens show the short answer?

Yes, I'm sure we'll get to that in a minute. But like I'm I'm over celebrating greatness. What we're seeing out of this combination of Andy Reed and Dan Campbell. I mean, you know, they hosted it five years in a row.

No one had ever done it more than three and they did it five years in a row. I mean, it's just nuts. And you know, the Niners are favored.

But like, you tell me anyone with a with a right thinking mind, why are you betting against that guy? I won't do that anymore. I will not do that. No chance. I do.

I do that now. Man, although I did. I thought Baltimore would win, but I liked Kansas City with three and a half. I just figured Justin Tucker was going to kick some like 64 yard field goal to win it at the end. So let's get to that real quick because the you can make the argument that Baltimore choked.

I don't want to sell Kansas City's defense short, which is obviously excellent. The play that Sneed made on Zay Flowers going in. That was a rough about 10 minutes for Zay Flowers. But the play he made on Flowers going into the end zone was an elite play because if he doesn't make that play, it's a touchdown.

I don't know what's going to happen after that. But if I could just juxtapose the two games, Brock Purdy did more Lamar Jackson things than Lamar Jackson did for Baltimore, the previous game. And that to me is the difference in the in the outcomes that we didn't really see the best of Lamar Jackson. We saw a guy who was maybe a little tentative. Real quickly on Purdy, 13 and 16 for 170 something yards and 60 something rushing yards all in the second half. Yeah. Out of possible zero to 100, a QBR, the ESPN metric, he measured out at 99.1 in the second half.

That is what we call responding to the moment. Okay, so now to your point, let's juxtapose that against the Ravens. In that game, the Ravens were at home playing a presumptive MVP quarterback, Lamar Jackson, and they had the number one scoring defense in the NFL. Yeah. They choked as an organization. Lamar had five completions in the first half. One was to himself, which by the way, was an amazing play. Yeah.

But you know, there was there was nothing there. Right. In that game, they had three turnovers from our Jackson fumble, two turnovers in the red zone.

I don't want to play by with various neighbors, by the way, is you want to call it karma, coincidence, irony, whatever that kept Baltimore out of the game, much in the same way. Meeko hardman's fumbled through the back of the end zone against the bills. Last week. Yeah.

Well, in the game, so one week later, it goes full circle. They also had four personal foul. Yep.

And they were all egregious and obvious. You know, uh, Kyle Ben Noy head, buddy, Travis Kelsey baited him into it like a pro perfectly. Uh, Henry, the big defensive tackle.

It's Patrick. Mahoney's in the head with his hand as he's running. I mean, it's the most obvious call you can ever get. Why are you punching the quarterback in the face today? Beyond clowny also comes in and headbutts Patrick. They're going to get that call every time.

And then say flowers to your point, right? Who that great catch stands over the player. Taunts throws the ball down at him. I mean, that's the easiest call of all time, according to the rules. And then what happened on the very next play, they're back at 15 yards and then the fumble. I mean, they did all these things.

And the other thing, which I thought was really interesting. They were the number one Russian team in the NFL in the regular season. They dropped back on 82% of their snaps on offense. What are you doing?

What are you doing? The turnovers, the incompletions, the personal files and bad game management Ravens did not respond to the moment. And that was my question going in. I knew, I knew that she's handled it.

I didn't know the Ravens. It turns out they could. Yeah. They handed it off eight times.

I think Lamar had four or five designed runs and they dropped back like 45 times. And I just, for the life of me, just don't understand that. All right. Final thing.

First of all, I'm assuming you're taking Kansas city next in, in two weeks over. Cause I am. Yeah.

Tell me, tell me why I shouldn't help me out. Exactly. Exactly.

Some way, shape or form as long as 87 is okay. And by the way, you're, you're, are you a big Swiftie now? Well, I mean, I think we all have to be, but I do find hilarious by the way, how many people are offended by this? Like, Oh, just crawl back into your cave, man.

She's not running your experience. The Jason Kelsey. When we showed him shirtless jumping out of sweet Buffalo. Oh, that's not about the game. It's terrible. You didn't have a problem with that. Can you shut up with all the other stuff? I love it.

Turn it off. I didn't realize there was an, we don't, we're not going to get into it. I didn't realize there was a much larger conspiracy at work with Taylor Swift and the NFL, but, but I've, I was unaware of that, but now I'll have to pay attention to it.

Final thing. Ben Johnson staying in Detroit. To me, this is about Washington, maybe wanting to go in a different direction, more than Ben Johnson deciding to stay and help Detroit win a Superbowl.

How do you read this? Well, I think that any of these opportunities for coaches, the first question any candidate has to say is what's the quarterback situation, right? No one knows that better than Bill Belichick, right? I had Brady, whatever since Brady crap, crap, crap.

And she'd been terrible, you know? So I, uh, I think that plays a part of it. I will say, I do believe there's a part of this, which is like Dan Quinn wanting to stay in Dallas last season after the last year's playing out in the post season. He feels comfortable with what he's doing. He likes the players and, you know, Dan, when you're a head coach, you don't really coach. It's about management.

Like I said, it's about game management. Dan's a coach at heart. And he got back to it. And if he doesn't get the Seattle job, he's going to go back to Dallas. I, you know, Ben is on a fast track and he's going to get a head coaching job somewhere, but there are a lot of things to like about the lion's situation with online raw and Reynolds and, and, you know, all the wide receivers Williams and Gibbs and Montgomery and report as a rookie.

I mean, there's a lot of things that are attractive about that job. If you're an offensive coordinator, I get it, but Washington is going to have, they have the second pick in the draft, five other picks in the top one Oh two. Uh, they have skill position players already in place. They just need help on both lines.

Really one of the edges on defense and the offensive line. But man, with all those picks, they can certainly, uh, they can certainly address that and $84 million in cap space. Uh, to me with a new owner who, and a heritage franchise. Oh, wow. That, that is, uh, that is hard to turn down. Uh, Trey Wingo, I appreciate your time at Wingo's with a Z on the end of it. Uh, and, uh, we'll talk again next time. We'll talk golf.

How about that? Love it, Adam. Always a pleasure. Take care. Trey Wingo here on the Adam Gold show.