This begins with Sheldon telling his father that a team shouldn’t “punt” on “fourth down.” His brother says “You always punt on fourth down, everybody knows that.”
Sheldon says that the other team has a 72% chance of scoring when you punt.
So, later, in a game (Sheldon’s father is a high school football coach), it’s the fourth down, and the other coach wants to send in the “punt team.” He says they are on the “12th line,” and have “plenty of time.”
Sheldon’s father says they are going to “go for it.”
The team gets a touchdown. You see someone run a long way across the field with the ball.
I Googled “punt on fourth down,” and I still don’t get it. But I don’t know anything about football.
What just happened?
Also, a couple of different times, Sheldon’s grandmother, who bets on sports, talks about “covering the spread.” I’ve heard this expression before, but don’t know what it means. Anyone know?
Is your question about what Sheldon was saying or about punting on the 4th down? I’m not a sports person by any means, so I’m sure I’ll get corrected here, but it’s my understanding that punting gets you less points than actually running the ball in, however, when it’s the 4th down and you’re not likely to get a 1st down, you have a better chance of scoring something if you just kick the ball over their heads and through the uprights.
Covering the spread…I’m also not a gambling person, so I’m getting even more out of my league here, but it’s my understanding that when there’s a game, the bookies might say that Team A will beat Team B by X points [the spread]. If you bet on Team A and they win by more than X points or you bet on Team B and they lose by less than X points, you’ve covered the spread.
All of it. I know nothing about football. You have to explain to me like I learned English from a record. I don’t know what “4th down” is. I don’t know what it means to “get a 1st down.” I don’t know what a “punt” is. I don’t know what “running the ball in” is-- although I can kinda guess there, and it’s probably the same thing as “going for it.”
From someone who dsoesn’t understand most of American Football (aka handegg)
1st down is your first attempt of 4 to get the ball at least 10 yards up the field. If you use up all 4 downs and you don’t make it 10 yards aggregate in that time your opponents get their 1st down, if you make it 10 yards, you go back to having a 1st down.
Punting is kicking the ball, giving up control but ensuring that your opponents start way back. Actually attempting to play the 4th down leaves a risk that your opponents will start a lot closer to your own end zone.
In football you have 4 downs (attempts) to gain 10 yards. That gives you a “new set of downs” and you can continue to move the ball down the field. If you haven’t gotten 10 yards on your first three downs most teams then punt, kicking the ball to the other team to start deep in their side of the field. If you run a normal play on 4th down and don’t gain the 10 yards, the other team gets the ball right there, a big advantage for them.
What Sheldon was suggesting is that while conventional wisdom is to punt, running a play gives you a better statistical chance to score points. Yes, you might give the opposing team good field position but you stand a better chance of gaining a new set of downs and keeping control of the ball.
He’s looking at the big picture for the statistics, but it applies to just the game they are playing. If they fail to advance the ball far enough or score on 4th down they have to turn the ball over to the other team, or they can kick it far back for the other team to start with. Sheldon is saying if they don’t kick the ball, even if they have to turn the ball over, statistically they are favored to still end up scoring before the other team does.
In betting on football the bet is based on one team winning by a certain number of points. That’s the spread, the team you pick to win doesn’t just have to win, they have to win by a certain number of points known as the spread.
I think you have to learn a lot more details about football to understand all about punting on 4th down, but it doesn’t really matter in this scenario. Sheldon is just saying make the choices based on the odds, not an analysis of just the current situation.
That’s what I was thinking. They make his father out to be sort of bone-headed for not wanting to listen to him at first, but really, you’d think that someone who knows enough about football to coach it knows enough to judge whether, in this situation, against this team, you punt or not.
No, he’s looking at individual plays within a single game.
It gets more complicated that this, but the basic idea in American football is that there is a field 100 yards long, with an “endzone” at each end. You want to take the ball, and move it into the endzone at the far end of the field. You want to stop your opponent from moving the ball into the endzone on your end of the field. And vice versa for your opponent.
Unlike some sports, like soccer and basketball, possession of the ball isn’t constantly going back and forth. There are relatively few possessions and opportunities to score in the game.
As others have indicated, the rules are that when you have the ball, you have four chances (“downs”) to move the ball towards your opponent’s endzone. If you succeed in moving it at least 10 yards, you get a new set of downs, and can keep trying to advance the ball (you get a new set of downs whenever you move the ball 10 yards, even if it only takes you one play). If you haven’t moved the ball at least 10 yards in a single set of downs, it’s a “turnover” - the other team takes possession of the ball at that point.
A team may, instead of trying to advance the ball in their possession, “punt it.” That means that they kick the ball way downfield, towards the opponent’s endzone. This isn’t an advance - by definition, a punt gives possession of the ball to the other team. But, they other team will take possession much further away from your own endzone than if you “went for it” on fourth down and failed.
Going for it on fourth down is generally considered a very risky play and not worth it unless your team is desperate (towards the end of a game where you have to score on that possession or you’ll lose). Punting is considered the safe, conservative play in most situations. Young Sheldon is using advanced analytics to argue that punting isn’t actually safer, because that opponent is so effective at scoring after a punt. He’s arguing that while tradition and instinct and common sense says punting is the better play, math says going for it is the better play.
Without explaining the entire game of football, Sheldon is calling for a play that goes against common wisdom in that situation, and he backs up his non-traditional play with statistics. What he is doing has actually been done by a high school football coach in Texas, and quite successfully (i.e. always or almost always going for it on 4th down instead of punting.) But that’s the only level of play I’ve heard of this non-traditional approach to 4th down being used conistently.
Correct, I mean, it’s Sheldon. He’s running the numbers and giving his dad the best odds for a specific play.
If you watch a football game and the commentator says ‘in the last 45 years, when the home team is down by 28 points at half time with the sun in their eyes and a light drizzle, they win 32% of the time, so the game isn’t a loss yet’. That’s Sheldon coming up with those numbers.
But we know, and George Sr knows and even Sheldon knows (and especially Dr Cox knows) that statistics don’t mean anything when it comes to an individual person/game.
It’s become general wisdom that teams should punt less than they do, especially in the area of the 50 to the opponents 40 or 35 or so. That’s in the pro game; I’d expect a high school kicker to get have less range. The point where it’s a long to impossible field goal. Any coach not punting on fourth down from their own 12 yard line in a case where it’s not convert or lose is going to be questioned mightily because you’ve already handed your opponent a chip shot field goal and probably a touchdown.
Going for it in an area where a punt might not net many yards is one thing. (And again, what those numbers are depend a lot on the level of the players.) Handing it over deep in your own territory with time left if your defense can get the stop and the ball back is just stupid.
Basically, the coach has a choice between a risky play that wins big (not punting) or a more likely to succeed play that wins little. A coach that always takes the risk is likely to be better off than a coach that plays it safe - in the long term. But taking the risk means that a lot of the time, he’ll be criticized by Monday-morning quarterbacks who see that that non-punting didn’t “work.”
Analogy: a venture capitalist invests in a lot of risky businesses. If you look at any one of the investments that goes broke, you can say “Gee, this guy wasted his money. He’d have been smarter to not invest in those guys” - but the VC makes his money because one time in 10 or one time in 100, one of those risky investments turns out to be Amazon or Google - and since there’s no way to tell in advance, his apparently foolish investment strategy of giving money to a startup with only a 2% chance of not going broke isn’t so foolish after all.
As noted, the idea of punting on 4th down relates to “field position”. If you fail to advance the ball far enough on 4th down, the team gets the ball where it was last stopped, likely very good field position, they have a short way to go to score.
If you punt, you voluntarily give up possession of the ball to put your opponent farther away from the goal line.
Thing is, there is a vast difference between NFL football and high school football with respect to punting. The field is a consistent 100 yards, the punter kicks from a consistent 15 yards behind the point where the ball is, but an NFL punter can kick the ball 60+ yards in the air, while a HS punter can punt the ball maybe 40-45 yards. The calculus is different, giving up possession for a 40-50 yard change in field position is a good deal, giving it up for a 20-30 yard change in field position is not.
I actually agree with this. But as I said, I don’t care if it was 20 years ago or today if the ball was on their own 12 and you’ve got time if you can get the stop. You punt it and hope that either special teams or defense can make a play. Maybe if you were down by four or less and think you could hold the team to the field goal, since you’d expect better field position from the kickoff, but then there’s still the question of the clock.
Oh, about the other question. The spread is a common way of gambling on football; less so in other sports where the money line is more common. Basically, the idea is that you gamble on whether a team will beat the other team by a certain amount of points. For example, in a game with two teams that are considered equally matched, the spread might be 3, with the home team favored to win. This can be expressed as Home -3, or Visitors +3. What it means is that a bet on Home to cover the spread is that they will win by 4 points or more. So 21-17 Home is a win, 21-20 Home is a loss. To bet on the other team–known as taking the points–is that the other team will lose by less than that amount or win outright. Both are beating the spread, but it tends to imply a loss for the team but a win for the gambler. 21-20 Home is a win in that case, but so is 21-20 Visitors. A 20-17 Home win is a push and neither side of the action wins.
Well, there’s also moneyline bets, which are straight-up who wins, without the spread taken into account. Essentially, a spread makes or tries to make a game an even money bet by giving points to the underdog.
Plenty of coaches for pro teams seem to make boneheaded decisions and punt when it seems they should have ‘gone for it’ on a key play. Or they did ‘go for it’ on 4th down, failed, and the other team gets the ball on downs and scores on their drive after starting with good field position. Basically success = genius move and failure = boneheaded call, no matter what statistics say. If the fictional Sheldon scenario had been real, not punting on 4th down could have gone bad for them, and Sheldon’s dad would really look like a bonehead and never listen to Sheldon’s football advice ever again, no matter how correct Sheldon was statistically.
A lot of factors go into the choice-- is your offense struggling late but you’re holding on to a slim lead and your defense is playing on top of their game? Punt and leave it up to the defense. Is the defense tired, and your offense got stopped at 4th down just past midfield, but your offense has generally been playing well? Are you Bill Belichick before Brady got traded? Go for it.