Bill Barnwell wrote:
There are a couple of plays you can run out of the swinging-gate concept, but the obvious one for the Colts would have been a screen pass. The Colts were lined up in an illegal formation since nobody but the center was on the line of scrimmage, but had they been lined up properly, nominal quarterback Colt Anderson had two receivers and seven blockers against six Patriots defenders on the right side of the field.
The other idea would pop up if the opponent overcompensates for the unexpected motion and sends eight or nine defenders after the traveling band of linemen. That leaves a center and a quarterback in the middle of the field against two or three defenders, and it’s usually pretty easy to pick up a few yards with that much space. I suspect that the Colts probably had that in mind for Anderson, who might not have thrown a pass since junior high school.
The most plausible explanation is that Griff Whalen and Anderson were only supposed to actually run a play if the numbers were favorable for a fake. If the numbers weren’t right, which they were not, Whalen wasn’t supposed to snap the football. The Colts were surely hoping the motion would force Bill Belichick to burn a timeout or that one of the Patriots defenders would make some sort of mental mistake and step offside at the sound of the vaunted Colt Anderson hard count, but that didn’t happen, either.
Instead, Whalen snapped the football. I wish I could tell you why Whalen snapped the ball. Maybe he didn’t bother to sufficiently look around and recognize that he didn’t have the appropriate numbers in the box to run the play as planned, which is possible when you use a player who isn’t normally a center to snap the ball.1 Maybe Whalen saw the play clock about to strike double-zero and panicked. Maybe he went all Leeroy Jenkins2 and decided to snap the ball, damn the torpedoes. I suspect we’ll never get a straight answer, in part because Whalen himself may not even know why he snapped the ball.
This explanation makes the play look less dumb. Still dumb, but not as bad as without the context.
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