Did Marty, Reid really cost their teams wins?

	A useless challenge that cost San Diego a timeout is not the main reason the Chargers lost to the Patriots. Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they read about sports: not just what kind of fan they are, but also their view of human history. It all comes down to this: do you read the game recap first, or do you go straight to the box score?

If you read the recap, you are the kind who subscribes to the "great man" theory of sports, and of history. You want to know, first and foremost, who is the hero, and who is to blame. For these people, the story is all about who hit the buzzer beater, or ran for the most yards, or shot Archduke Ferdinand to set off World War I.

Then there are the box score scanners, more interested in the tidal flows and inexorable forces that make a particular outcome inevitable. They want to know who controlled the time of possession, made the fewest turnovers, or what made Europe such a powder keg in the early 20th century.

These two camps likely would be split down the line on one of the big sports topics from the past week: How much blame do you place the Chargers' and Eagles' playoff losses on the bad decisions made by head coaches Marty Schottenheimer and Andy Reid, respectively?

Schottenheimer is being second-guessed for challenging a fourth-quarter referee's call that had no chance of being reversed, thus costing his team a timeout that they needed late in their loss to New England. For the Eagles, Reid elected to punt instead of going for it on fourth-and-15 with his team down and little time. Afterward, even Reid admitted the decision made no sense. "I guess in hindsight, maybe we should have done that because we didn't get the ball back," Reid said. Really, you think?

The Game Story people, demanding heroes and villains for their narratives, have concluded that these two cost the teams places in the championship games, a shot at the Super Bowl. It's on them.

There's no defending either of those decisions. But as a box score reader, I'd have to disagree. If you look at the raw numbers, you see there was a lot more to these losses than two bad decisions.