Vikings coach Brad Childress addressed a variety of subjects Tuesday during his season-ending news conference at Winter Park. One of the most important was just how in the heck the Vikings got called for a 12 men in the huddle penalty with 19 seconds left in the fourth quarter of their overtime loss to New Orleans on Sunday in the NFC title game.
That play took the Vikings from a second-and-10 at the Saints 33 -- in other words field-goal range for Ryan Longwell -- to a third-and-15 at the Saints 38. With the score tied at 28, Brett Favre then threw a pass that was intercepted and ended a drive that only moments earlier looked as if it could end with the Vikings headed to the Super Bowl.
So what happened? Here are Childress' answers on the topic of a play that will go down in Vikings lore with the "pushoff" and "taking a knee."
Q. As far as the penalty, was fullback Fahu Tahi the extra man and was running backs coach Eric Bieniemy responsible for sending him onto the field? How did that unfold?
A. "It was a 30-second timeout and you look back through the timeline. I got questions about how we started the 2-minute drive, we typically try to conserve our timeouts until the last minute unless we've got a gain of 10 or 15 yards that we can't get up and get to the ball [because] it takes a while for those linemen to get down there. But that was a 30-second timeout and we had talked about the same play with two different personnel groupings. The initial conversation was about a personnel grouping with a tailback and a fullback and we ended up settling on a tight end, three-wide type of operation [there actually were two tight ends and two wide receivers in the huddle] and we had the fullback in the huddle. Typically, when you hold your guys as we do, because [the Saints] are looking from that sideline to try to see what personnel you have, you're running people on and people are running off. But Tahi had gone into the game because that was the first part of the conversation and it's an error in communication and it all comes back to me not having it over-communicated."
Q. When did you realize that 12 guys were out there?
A. "Just as we broke the huddle and we had just come out of calling a timeout. You can't call back-to-back timeouts. That's the rules. So it was going to be a penalty one way or the other, breaking the huddle with the too many men or calling a timeout."
Q. At that point, is there anybody on the staff that is supposed to be looking for that or is it just too late?
