Correction noted, but going for 4th and 1 from your own 9? My point stands.
I was fooled by the text of the article, which says:
In fact, our model recommends a go on fourth-and-1 in typical situations anywhere on the field.
Of the NFC East, at least Washington can hold onto the hope that new ownership seems willing to rebuild the house from the bottom up. The Cowboys are stuck with Jerry until someone drives a stake through his heart.
Well we all know Taylor is just using Kelce - to have material to write her next ex-boyfriend breakup song. Maybe her creativity has waned and she needs a new spark.
Or she hopes to be the new singer for MNF.
I don’t actually know that.
The article also states that all these recommendations are for “typical situations”, and specifically exclude the entire 4th quarter:
The following represents a guide to ESPN’s decision analysis recommendations based on typical situations. Those are when teams are still in the point maximization phase of the game. Think of it this way: A normal game in the first half or even early in the third quarter, where teams are within two scores of each other.
So if it’s 4th and 1 from your own 9, 4th quarter and you’re down by 2, you’ve got a great punter and there’s a strong wind at your back, I think even the in-house nerd who developed these charts would agree that you punt.
What is a scorigami?
A score that hasn’t happened before.
I won’t belabor the point after this post, but the article talks about going for it on 4th-and-1, and going for the 2-point conversion, presumably from the 2-yard line.
The only way to get into a 2-point try from the 1-yard line is if the defense committed a penalty on your first attempt. If your first attempt was going for 2, then of course you will want to go for 2 again. However, if your first attempt was a successful extra point, then you must factor in the added consideration of losing a point vs. gaining a point.
A chart of all scores that have and haven’t happened: https://nflscorigami.com/
You have a greater than 50% chance from the one, so the expected value is still higher going for two than it is with a guaranteed one.
If the defense commits a penalty and you can go for two from the one, you always should.
OK, here’s an extreme situation:
Team A trails by six and scores a TD with 15 seconds left in the game. They kick the extra point and take a one-point lead. Team B, in trying to block the kick, jumped offside. Does Team A accept the penalty and go for two?
I thought the chart specifically does not apply in the 4th quarter, never mind the last minute.
I would say no, but only because there’s no real difference between a 1 point lead and a 2 point lead in that situation. Any score by the other team beats you.
The whole NFC East was trash this year. Giants and Washington trash, Cowboys look good on paper as usual then get one of the worst playoff humiliations in franchise history; Eagles start out 10-1 then go 1-6 from then on.
This is clearly answered by the chart in @Atamasama’s post.
Find the block that says 0 (meaning tied after the TD). Go all the way to the right where there is <1minute remaining. The red line is how likely your two-point try has to be to justify going for it. The answer for that situation is 100%. So you would only go for 2, even after the penalty, if you have 100% certainty you will convert it. Obviously no team is 100% on conversions from the 1, so you would kick.
You’ll forgive me for rolling my eyes. And your extreme situation wasn’t extreme enough. Instead of 15 seconds, there could be no time left on the clock. Obviously you keep the win. Duh.
Can you dig up a cite anywhere that says you’re supposed to kick after a penalty where a two-point would be from the one? All the cites I found say things like “going for two is a no-brainer” and “you would almost always go for two after a penalty” and then go on to discuss a chart detailing what to do if there is no penalty.
But thank you for identifying that contrived scenario that makes them say things like “almost always.” The game situation we are talking about in this thread that actually happened, you’re supposed to go for two. Same as in almost every other possible scenario.
I got tricked, a little, over this a couple weeks ago. The side boards during the Blackhawks game had an ad for a local, Chicago area business so when I glanced at the screen, I assumed they were at home. But the crowd cheering and subtle goal horn notifications were mixed up. Yep, the digital ads are tailored to the viewing market.
There are also ads on MLB pitchers’ mounds now, too.
OK, I made my point. And yes, it was a rather stupid eye-roller. And, yes, my point was ‘almost always’.
I guess, if I were a coach, I would err on the side of caution, even if the probabilities were slightly in my favor. I’ve watched enough football to know that when a 2-point try fails, that almost always comes back to haunt them.
But obviously I’m in the minority. Not the first time.
Nah, you’re in the majority, at least of coaches. Very few are willing to take the risks that the analytics say they should.
But it isn’t because it comes back to haunt them. It’s because they get criticized much more for risky plays that don’t work out than for low-risk plays that don’t work out.
Coaches coach to avoid criticism. NFL fans are extremely conservative by nature. If you do something out of the norm, and it fails, it opens you up for criticism. If you take an aggressive 4th down call even if it’s clearly the right thing to do and it fails, NFL fans will scream about how you’re an idiot and you should always punt there. But of course if it works, then their criticisms melt away. The fans are also extremely results-oriented.
But to a lot of people have a bad intuitive sense of strategy. They try to avoid “fail more” situations where it doesn’t matter. For instance, let’s say you’re playing a team that’s much better than yours. You will only beat them 20% of the time, but if you play conventional conservative football, maybe you keep it close and respectable. Now let’s say you devise a novel, extreme gameplan that gives you a 30% chance to win, but if you lose, it’s an embarassing blowout loss.
Rationally, you should take the 30% win chance. Whether you lose by 1 or 100, it’s still a loss. But the vast majority of NFL fans will take the 20% chance to play conservative football so that there’s no particular decisions outside of what they consider the norm, and if a coach executed the plan with the best chance to win, he would face massive backlash and criticism.
Fans also like to find a single point of failure. This one dropped pass, that lost the game. That one aggressive fourth down call, that lost the game. Of course in a close game there were 100 moments where things could’ve gone differently and changed the outcome, but the NFL fans like to pick the most salient ones. And coaches making an unconventional/too aggressive decision is always very salient and gives them a focal point to say “this is why we lost the game” and blame the coach. Whereas if the coach plays more conservatively they lose in a more subtle way, and there’s no single point of failure that’s as easy to point to, and the blame becomes more diffuse.
So NFL coaches, wanting to keep their jobs, continuously make sub-optimal decisions that are, whether they realize it or not, designed to spread out the criticism and not focus it on a single decision they made. There are a few coaches that actually do it right - Bellichick, Sean Payton, a few others - but it’s risky and they need to establish some success to ride out fan criticism. But it does give them an edge against most coaches that will consistently fail to optimize their win chances.
Seems like Dan Campbell went in the other direction - the Lions have been so bad for so, so very long that he doesn’t get as much (still more than he should) criticism for what have been perceived as hyper-aggressive calls.
I think coaches have built a great intuitive grasp of coaching strategy but the real problem is the strategy is for the game of ‘coaches staying employed/avoiding fan wrath’ rather than the game of ‘building long term, sustained on-field football success’.
From that point of view, NFL coaches have been making near optimal decisions. The main issue is that incentives/penalties for those decisions line up closer to what the fans/owners actually want (conservative decisions that magically still win lots of games despite all evidence and/or reason) vs what they say they want (just win, baby!).