I should start with the disclaimer that the highest level of sports I ever played was number two singles on my high school varsity tennis team. I coached varsity tennis as volunteer for a handful of seasons. Now, onto today's topic:
Why is it so freaking hard for professional athletes and coaches to understand the clock?
You see it probably once a week. Somebody doesn't take their timeout, a ball carrier stays inbounds rather than duck out of bounds, a player losses track of the shot clock, I could go on and on. There are plenty of examples of it in any sport at any level.
Why is this such an epidemic? What is possessing the people that get paid the big bucks to not have a clue about how to approach late game scenarios?
I truly don't have an answer to this one. It baffles me. There is no excuse for an entire team, particularly coaches, to have a misstep in utilizing the clock. Obviously there are huge amounts of things running through everyone's head, many of which are dependent on potential variables, so I get that sometimes things get lost in the checklist. But of all the things that you need to be conscious of, the clock is probably the top one.
That said, every team should have a situational manager. Somebody who has the math of how many plays and timeouts equals too long for us to be able to run the clock out. Someone who is in charge of sprinting up the sideline to get the timeout off when there is a long completion with 15 seconds to play and you need a field goal to win. This role doesn't need to be filled by a genius, just someone who has the wherewithal to be aware and do the simple task the two or three times a game that the clock matters more than anything else.
Frankly, this person doesn't necessarily even need to know all the ins and outs. Like chess, the clock is pretty much a solved game. Make a sheet with all the various endgame situations and timestamps of when to do what and how long each thing takes. Boom. Solved. Now just give the sheet to your nearest assistant coach, it can even be a GA, and let them run the clock aspect of the game.