INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Los Angeles Chargers star defensive end Joey Bosa feared his helmet had come undone at the worst possible time.
He scrambled to the sideline to get it buckled Sunday afternoon with the Chargers clinging to a six-point lead midway through the fourth quarter and the Las Vegas Raiders facing fourth-and-1 from the Chargers’ 43-yard line.
Turns out Bosa didn’t need to rush. After a brief discussion with his assistant coaches on his headset, Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce elected to send punter A.J. Cole onto the field rather than go for it, a confounding decision that Bosa admitted “shocked” him.
“I just knew that they were going to go for it on fourth down, so I was hustling to get back out there,” Bosa said after the Chargers’ 22-10 victory. “I was happy that they punted.”
Win-probability models suggest that Raiders fans at SoFi Stadium were right to boo Pierce’s decision to punt while trailing 16-10 with seven minutes to go. The Raiders had a 24.8% chance to come back and win had they gone for it, according to ESPN Analytics. Their odds dropped to 19.1% with the punt.
Pierce’s decision to punt bucked the modern NFL trend of coaches getting aggressive on 4th-and-short. No NFL team since September 2016 has punted on fourth-and-1 from the opposing team’s territory while trailing by one score, according to the sports technology company Sportradar.
In his postgame news conference, Pierce defended his choice to punt even though the Chargers went on to drive 92 yards in eight plays, the decisive play a 61-yard J.K. Dobbins run that set up a Ladd McConkey touchdown reception. The goal, Pierce said, was to play a field-position game, to show trust in his defense and to get the ball back still within six points.
“We got what we wanted,” Pierce said. “We got them backed up. We had three timeouts.
“They broke off a long run and that was the end of it.”
When asked if he was surprised by Pierce’s decision to punt, Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh insisted he wasn’t. He speculated that a Chargers fourth-down stop earlier in the game might have played a role in Pierce’s thought process, as might the Chargers’ struggles to move the ball on offense during much of the game.
“Our offense wasn’t moving the ball,” Harbaugh said. “We had a lot of three-and-outs in this game. But when we needed to not have a three-and-out the most, to take the ball 92 yards and 80 yards, those were game-winning drives.”