New York Giants head coach Joe Judge has made peculiar decisions with his timeouts this season, including in a Week 8 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday evening. After calling a time out on the first drive of the game, he failed to make proper judgments, leading to his offense trying to run a two-minute drill with no stoppage opportunities at both ends of the half.
In addition, Judge called a time out after the two-minute warning, allowing 40 seconds to run off the clock for no reason. Judge allowed the clock to run all the way down to the warning, when he could’ve used his time out, forcing Kansas City to run another play and utilizing the warning as a de-facto stoppage to stop the clock. Instead, the second-year HC presented a terrible reason for his inept.
“The headsets were going out,†Judge said. “We are having headset issues. This has happened in every game so far. We deal with the league and they keep telling us there are different software updates or whatever it is. But we had to call two timeouts because we were trying to send the deals in personnel-wise and you got half of the headsets not getting reception.â€
Judge placed the blame completely on the NFL, indicating he’s been suffering inconsistencies with the equipment every week so far this season. The NFL fired back on Tuesday, stating the team has not spoken to them about any issues and haven’t been communicated with properly regarding the problem.
The NY Daily News received a statement from the NFL stating:
“We were not made aware of any issues during the game from the club through our standard communication channels that are used to identify gameday issues.”
“We are looking into the matter with all involved parties; however, we are confident that nothing is attributable to the Bose headset,†the NFL added.
Essentially, the NFL is calling out Judge for his excuse, which makes him look incredibly foolish at a defining moment in the season. The Giants now sit at 2–6 on the year, leading one of the league‘s worst offenses and featuring an inconsistent coaching staff that preaches discipline but fails to uphold their words.