“You don’t win, you get criticized on everything, so that’s par for the course,” Denver coach John Fox said after the game. “Thirty seconds, it’s hard to go the length of the field, some bad stuff can happen — as you saw at the end of the game.”
What Fox seemed to be referencing there (though the time window is a bit off) is Manning’s brutal overtime interception, which set the stage for Baltimore to walk off a winner.
Rather than risk a Manning mistake late in regulation, Fox opted to play for overtime — mimicking his strategy at the end of the first half, when he had Manning hand off to Jacob Hester once before heading to the locker room, taking three timeouts with him.