Sports

With the Packers trailing 3-0 in the fourth quarter on Monday night, they faced a fourth-and-11 at the Eagles' 40-yard line. The analytics said to try a 58-yard field goal. Matt LaFleur decided to punt. That decision came back to haunt him.

The punt went for a touchback, so it netted only 20 yards of field position. And the Eagles marched down the field and scored a touchdown on the next drive, to take a 10-0 lead. The Packers would later score a touchdown of their own to make it 10-7, but they lost by that score when they missed a 64-yard field goal attempt as time expired.

Ultimately, LaFleur turned down a chance at a 58-yard field goal to punt, then had to try a 64-yard field goal at the end of the game. We'll never know if Brandon McManus would have made that 58-yarder, but he's made longer kicks than that before (his career-long is 61 yards), and in today's NFL, 58 yards is well within field goal range: NFL kickers are 18-for-29 (62 percent) on field goals between 57 and 59 yards this season.

LaFleur was surely worried that if the Packers had missed the 58-yard field goal the Eagles would have capitalized on their good field position, but the Eagles scored a touchdown on the drive after the punt anyway. A miss wouldn't have been any worse than the punt was, and a make would have given the Packers three more points in a game they lost by three.

Punting is rarely the correct decision when losing in the fourth quarter. The analytics actually said going for it on fourth-and-11, while not as good a choice as attempting a field goal, would have been a better choice than punting. If you're losing in the fourth quarter you need to score, not give the ball to the other team.

LaFleur gave the ball to the Eagles, and the ultimate result was sending his kicker onto the field to try a 64-yard field goal. He would have been better off trying a 58-yard field goal when he had the chance.

The Eagles and Packers were tied 0-0 at halftime on Monday night. That doesn't happen very often.

Monday night marked the first time in almost two full years that an NFL game has been scoreless at halftime.

Oddly enough, the last time an NFL game was scoreless at halftime, it happened twice on the same day: On December 10, 2023, the Jets and Texans were tied 0-0 at halftime, and the Vikings and Raiders were also tied 0-0 at halftime.

Overall, though, it's a rare occurrence: In the last 10 years, only five NFL games have been 0-0 at the end of the second quarter. Scoreless halftime games are about a 1-in-500 occurrence in the NFL, or around 0.2 percent of games.

Unsurprisingly, 0-0 halftime scores have become much less common as NFL offenses have grown more sophisticated and rules favoring the offense have been passed. What was once commonplace in the old days of the NFL has now become the rarity that was on display on Monday night, a first half in which neither team could get on the scoreboard.

After the Vikings committed eight false starts in Sunday's loss to the Ravens, their running back Aaron Jones said that the Ravens were "playing a little game" on the defensive line to cause some of the issues.

Jones said that the Ravens were making "move calls" that could be taken for Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy's cadence, but head coach Kevin O'Connell said he did not hear anything like that from players during the game. On Monday, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh said he agreed with his colleague that "it wasn't anything we were doing."

"I went back and I watched it, because we didn't have a gameplan for that," Harbaugh said, via a transcript from the team. "If we did, I would've been happy, but we're not going to do anything illegal. If you stem, you make a move call, which is what you do; you're allowed to say, 'Move.' You're not allowed to say 'set,' or 'hut,' or anything else. Or a cadence, which we never have done. But then I watched all of them, and [on] none of them did we stem. Not one did we move.

Harbaugh suggested the Vikings' own pre-snap shifts and cadence variations had a hand in the unusual number of false starts for the home team and that leaves it as an issue for O'Connell to address as they move on with their season.