Oh. So while the idea of a punt is to put the other team at a disadvantage, in this specific case, the “Wolves,” (Coach Cooper’s team) was (were?) so close to the other team’s goal that even punting may still have left the other team in a good position?
ETA: Are there specific people on the offense team who are really good runners?
possibly. if they had a good punter he could have the ball caught around the 50-40 yard line. that would mean that the opposing team would have to advance the ball 50-40 yards to score. (if the receiver had a fair catch or did not have a good run back) much better than turning the ball over and have them only have to go 17-12 yards.
what you described is a really good play. the fake is the most important part of that, and as mentioned upthread, on offence you want really fast, light guys to run the ball. most defencive players can not catch up to an offence player who is 10-20 yards ahead.
That explains why Georgie is playing on the offense team. He’s not very tall, and really thin. He looks like he weighs about 125lbs.
yep, those are usually the running backs. the idea is that the players fake the other team one way and send the running back flying up the field the other (the play you described). or have the offencive line create an opening in the defencive line and send the rb through.
More that if they went for it on 4th down and failed, they’d be setting their opponents up with a quick and relatively easy touchdown, because they’d only have to go about 17 yards, rather than about 40-50 yards to score.
Punting would have given them good field position, but not great field position, like failing on 4th down would have.
OK, if they were starting at their own 12, then this is starting to look like that thing movies do where they show that a guy is a good poker player by having him get a royal flush. No, he wasn’t good; he did something stupid and got lucky.
Yes, real teams punt way more often than they should, and usually, by the numbers, you shouldn’t actually punt. Usually. When you’re pushed back to your own 12, though, that’s not “usually”. Not only will a failure on the run leave the other team with a fairly good chance of getting a touchdown, but even if you can stop that, they’re almost guaranteed to get a field goal.
Similarly, while trick plays are a real thing, they show up way too often in movies and TV. They do work… occasionally. But only occasionally. You can’t use them too often, because if your opponent is expecting them, they’ll fail terribly.
And combining a high-risk, high-reward trick play, with a high-risk, high-cost situation like going for it on fourth down, early in the game when risk isn’t necessary, is just bad coaching, even if it does happen to work out that one time.
Well, the Cavendish banana wasn’t introduced to the US market until 1903, and didn’t take over the market until the previously popular Gros Michel experienced a blight in the 1950s.
In addition to the math involved in punting strategy, the psychological aspect of punting is that there is a ‘conceding-defeat’ connotation to it - you are acknowledging that “this drive failed.” That, then, plays a role in sports fiction when or if you have some fictional stubborn head coach who refuses to “admit defeat” by insisting on going for it on 4th down, which then leads to either a spectacularly good or spectacularly bad outcome.
Well, I think in this particular case, since the episode is set in the mid-80s, and I’m gathering that even professional football hadn’t recognized the statistical folly of always punting, it’s about Sheldon being insightful even when he has nothing invested. He just sees everything in terms of numbers, so sometimes he’s apparently bone-headed, when he can’t read the emotion of a character in a cartoon designed to be very obvious, but other times he’s a genius when he sees things other people don’t see.
Coach Cooper would never have tried that play if Sheldon hadn’t explained the statistics to him. And while Sheldon’s dad is very much beef, ball and beer, he’s not actually dumb.
Nobody always punts and it’s not statistical folly as explained in this thread. It was fiction.
But he should have punted in that situation. They got lucky (the writers created luck), it wasn’t a valid statistical analysis of that game.
Actually, the “right” way for this scene to have ended would have been for George’s team to not pick up the first down, then have the other team score quickly and have all the fans get mad at George. Then, when George complains to Sheldon later that he took his advice and it didn’t work, Sheldon would have been able to explain the concept of statistics.
Because while in general it makes sense to go for it on fourth down more often, in this particular instance it was a really bad idea. If George had taken a moment to turn to the crowd and ask Sheldon whether this was a good time to go for the fourth down conversion, Sheldon would (if he was as smart as the show says) done some quick math in his head that added up to PUNT.
Sheldon’s stat was only useful over, say, a whole season of punt attempts. It wasn’t good advice at all for this particular fourth down.
That’s a good point. Plus going for it so deep in their own territory still doesn’t seem like a good idea even if statistics show the team will ultimately score more.
I found the scenes on Youtube.
And just to make everything more complicated, the quarterback wasn’t in on the play that worked. Number 12 is the QB in the previous play (Power Left Jumble) but on the attempt after the penalty, the ball is hiked to number 34, who fakes the handoff to 20 and then keeps it himself. It appears to be an RPO type play out of a wildcat formation.
RPO is Run-Pass option where the QB can either hand off to the running back, keep it and run, or pass it to a receiver. This is used a lot in college and takes advantage of athletic QBs, it’s used less often in the NFL because the QBs take a lot of hits when they run.
Wildcat is where the ball is hiked to a player other than QB, usually an RB. That player can hand off, pass, or run with the ball.
thank you for the clip. that was a really good trick play.
No need to be embarrassed that you don’t understand football. In fact if my teenage sons are any indication, younger generations think that enjoying football and understanding the rules is seriously uncool 
I didn’t care about or understand football at all until after I graduated college. I had a couple friends who liked football, so I started watching and even getting invited to go to games (which is a very different experience than watching it on TV) and got to enjoy the game a lot.
I also find knowledge of football helps in the working world sometimes. I used to have a boss who loved using football terms for business. Two of his favorites were ‘punting’ (cutting one’s losses on a failing project before too many resources are expended; not too hard to figure out from context) and ‘moving the chains’ (making incremental progress on a project; from the down markers on the sidelines that are attahed to chains, that are moved when progress is made on the field).
His analysis was terrible BTW. He said “Since they convert on 4th down 50% of the time, the math says they should never punt again.” But that would only be true if they used a random selection like flipping a coin to decide whether or not to go for it on 4th down. Which obviously they do not. Even a 12 year old genius should understand that.
And the board in the background said it was 4th and 17 yards to go. Terrible, terrible math Sheldon.
Oh, grasshopper, there are subtleties in football – as in any sport – that the posters haven’t even begun to touch upon. I was never enthusiastic but I’ve picked up some because my brother and father were but for us, basketball is just a lot of tall guys running back and forth on squeaky shoes.
Horse racing, OTOH… The bunch of us had gathered to watch Big Brown in the Belmont Stakes try for the first Triple Crown in thirty years. He was running a little rank at first but seemed to settle down and I was literally quietly counting down, “Three, two, one … No Triple Crown today.”
“What are you talking about? There’s a quarter mile to go!”
“Doesn’t matter – he should have made his move back where I called it and he didn’t.”
Sure enough, he was eased before the finish. “How’d you know?”
“We’ve* been watching him since the Florida Derby back in March and know how he runs.”
*DesertRoomie and I.
That’s what they said? Nobody has a 50% success rate going for it on 4th and 17, unless maybe they only tried it twice and it worked once. But it is just a TV show. The adult Sheldon had his football down solid, I suspect the writers embellished the details of the story he told them.
Oh, come on. You know the people who wrote it majored in either Theater or English in college, and probably haven’t seen an entire football game among them.
They asked someone what to say, and if they transposed a number somewhere, who’d catch it?