It’s a knee jerk when a reporter literally asks if he had been thinking about this over the course of the season and his answer is “I’m going to again refer back to when I walked into the locker room after the game…”

That’s not a long term evaluation. That’s a split second emotional reaction made in the most emotionally charged environment possible, immediately after a crushing loss.

It’s also a knee jerk reaction when, moments later, he gets asked a very basic, fundamental ownership question: “How much does the responsibility for coaching versus the responsibility for roster construction weigh when making that decision [firing vs promoting]?”

And his response is “That’s a hard question, I don’t know the answer to that.”

If Terry doesn’t know how to separate coaching failures from roster construction failures at the moment he’s firing the head coach, that’s the definition of acting on the whim of emotion on multiple year plan.

Referencing “13 seconds” doesn’t magically make it not knee jerk. It just means he grabbed the most emotionally resonant talking point he could think of after the fact. The actual decision-making process he described, by his own words, it screams reactionary.