When Chiefs coach Todd Haley on Sunday chose to angrily wag a finger in the direction of Denver’s Josh McDaniels, rather than extend a hand, it renewed the debate over a question that has been posed many times before, but never definitively answered:
Is there any etiquette in the NFL when it comes to the scoreboard?
Haley clearly thought so then, and his snub of McDaniels’ offer of a postgame handshake left the topic hanging out there — like the empty right hand of the Broncos youthful head coach — for the rest of us to mull over in the wake of Denver’s 49-29 thumping of first-place Kansas City. At least until Haley issued an apology to McDaniels and Broncos fans the very next day, calling his move “not right,” and admitting he let his emotions get the best of him.
Haley this week refused to elaborate on what exactly set him off in the course of Denver’s 20-point home win, but the facts are these: The last-place Broncos raced to a 35-0 lead in the middle of the second quarter, and were then outscored 29-14 by the Chiefs over the course of the game’s final 2½ quarters. It’s tough to make a case that Denver ran up the score, but clearly sometimes the blowout is in the eye of the beholder.
These things almost always have a little history to them, and it’s probably instructive to remember that in Week 17 of last season, with the swooning Broncos fighting for their lives in the AFC wild-card playoff race, Haley and his 3-12 Chiefs came into Denver and administered a 44-24 beat-down (yep, by that same 20-point margin), snuffing out Denver’s postseason hopes at 8-8.
Chiefs running back Jamaal Charles ran for a franchise-record 259 yards that day, and Kansas City’s 317 yards rushing were the fourth-highest total in team history. But it was a 27-24 Chiefs lead after three quarters, so there was no notion of K.C. running up the score when it hung another 17 points on the board in the final quarter.
In talking this week to a collection of sources that included a former NFL starting quarterback, an ex-NFL head coach and a current club front-office executive, I found little support for the idea of an unwritten mercy rule in the league. Even though all of them made a distinction of sorts between the standards that are accepted in the NFL game, compared to the college game, where questions have arisen this season about teams potentially running up the score (see Wisconsin 83, Indiana 20 last Saturday in Madison).
“It’s a worn-out statement, but it’s true: The NFL is a big-boy league and you just deal with it,” said Trent Dilfer, the ex-NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst. “You don’t feel sorry for anyone. Feelings don’t matter in the NFL. You don’t get many opportunities to be on your ‘A’ game in the NFL, so you score as many touchdowns as you can. You have to remember that you’re also putting stuff on tape for the other teams you haven’t played yet to worry about.
Full Story: Running up the score is not governed by unwritten rule in NFL – Sports Illustrated