Comments on Advanced NFL Stats: Are NFL Coaches Too Timid?

"The bigger the spread, the smaller the under...

2011-09-28T01:00:03.349-04:00

"The bigger the spread, the smaller the underdog’s variance and the bigger the favorite’s variance. It appears underdogs may get less aggressive while favorites may get more aggressive."

You only listed SD in the favorite and underdog's scores, not the means. Presumably the means are higher for the favorites.

So looked at relative to the mean scores, maybe favorites and underdogs are the same, or maybe the trend even goes in the "right" direction?

Sometimes to kick the 3 would avoid a turnover and...

2011-02-03T07:50:26.297-05:00

Sometimes to kick the 3 would avoid a turnover and go ahead and get your team 3 points. It's not as if converting on 4th down guarantees 7. It could result in an interception run back by the other team, or another loss on downs if you try forcing the issue and going for it on 4th down again. Putting 3 on the board for your team ain't a bad idea if you got a kicker you can really trust and you're really not particularly confident about getting in the endzone on a particular drive against certain defenses especially and always depending on the score and the time.

Really, it's interesting to think that if you ...

2011-02-03T07:40:32.599-05:00

Really, it's interesting to think that if you basically forced the issue with the touchdown and punted when it was wise to do so...you'd just have to get in the endzone 4 times and you've got 28...4 touchdowns beats 9 field goals in the game of pro football, basically. Or more realistically, let's say 4 touchdowns vs. 2 touchdowns & 4 field goals. 28-26.

Yes...with the touchdown being worth 7 and the fie...

2011-02-03T07:36:54.050-05:00

Yes...with the touchdown being worth 7 and the field goal only 3, it's as if the only time the ball should be punted/kicked is if 1) you are not past the 50 yard line, go ahead and punt you don't want to give your opponent the ball & already in position to strike with a 20 yard pass 2)you are beyond the 50 but it is a 4th and 8 or more say..you should always have a play that you can be confident can get you about 7 yards maybe so if you don't get it fine...you are still leaving your opponent in bad shape, but if you get it!, then you still have an opportunity for SEVEN...or 3) it's the end of the game and the score is 26-24 and there are :04 seconds left and you can go ahead and send you FG kicker out to win it. AKA you need 3.

I believe this would be just as effective scoring as the way teams play it now...and a more exciting brand of football.

What most people don't know, but should is tha...

2010-08-21T04:44:05.069-04:00

What most people don't know, but should is that football is like a coin that has two sides. Everyone knows the universal truth of the first side of the coin that says that a team that scores more points than the opponent always wins. What people don't know is how a team lost a game without factoring the score. The other side of the coin would say that the team with the most real turnovers always losses the game. Statisticians do not count all events that turn the ball over without first scoring atleast 6 points. If they did they would see that the team with the higher number always losses. Try this with any game and you will see that it works:

Complete Turnovers: Interceptions, fumbles lost, missed fg's, punts, 4th down fails, kickoffs lost, safeties, and turnovers due to time (given if the team in possesion at the end of the half failed to score and has to kick to start the second half. Not counted if another turnover half or whole occurs at the same time. Also when the game ends and the team trailing fails to score before the time expiresn not counted against the team with the lead. also nullified if another turnover takes place.

Half Turnovers: Failed extra point or 2pat, Successful field goal, 2point conversion allowed.

In a year when the NFL is being dominated 300-400 ...

2009-12-07T09:00:12.717-05:00

In a year when the NFL is being dominated 300-400 yards through the air a game, with the #1, currently 12-0 team in the nfl having the league lowest rushing totals (though also tied for the league's 2nd most rushing points), while some of the bottom-feeders like the Raiders seem to do nothing, and lose (except to the steelers o.O), and dothers like the Rams and the Bills try to throw the ball and be aggressive all day get nowhere...

I think we have ourselves an anomaly =]

Or...The points here aren't as accurate as they initially seem.
Oh sure, I could see looking at your avg/rush, distance to 4th down, and 4th down conversion rate and realizing it'd be prudent to go for it a few times you'd have never thought of it before, however...

This entire article Seems to indicate that Aggression in a game creates scoring and Conservatism limits it on both sides of the ball.

I would suggest that "aggression" is probably not going to win an underdog a game, in fact, if they are the less talented game, it will probably just make it worse.

For example, Let's look at the Lions and the Colts. Colts would be a huge favourite, so according to this article, the right thing to do would be for the Lions to play as aggressively as possible, passing deep, avoiding burning the clock, so maybe go no huddle, don't really run the ball if you can help it, except in very short yardage situations, and trust your defense to keep up as you keep them on the field for half a quarter longer than your opponent.

Further, in order to safeguard themselves, the Colts should play conservatively. Huddling between run plays to run the clock, and not putting pressure on the lions qb, favoring zone coverages instead.

Ideally, that should work, right? Except, this article completely ignores the dynamic matchups that decide NFL games. The Colts have the #1 passing game with the Last ranked running game, while the Lions are bottom last at defending against the pass, and are in the bottom quarter of the league for passing it themselves, combined with their inability to convert on 3rd down, and an even worse 4th down percentage, and 10 giveaways in 12 games, I really don't think they'd be giving themselves any chance whatsoever to win this game, but the Colts would also be inexplicably toning down what they do best in favour of what they do worst.

Of course, this is about as an extreme of a contrast as you can get between two teams, but that's why I used it to illustrate the one-dimensionalness of "agression" vs "conservatism" as defining strategies.

Instead, it's about getting the edge on a mismatch and exploiting it, that's what wins games. So for an upset to occur, the underdog has to find an unexpected exploit, and push it all they can, and hope it's enough. Sometimes, sure, it'll be a hole in their coverage zones that throwing it deep will exploit, or it'll be a bad matchup on the corner with your RE, and you'll play more aggressively on both sides of the ball. Or maybe, it'll be that the Colts' run efense is in the bottom half, and the Lions can chip away at them by running it up the middle. Would it be enough to win? Probably not, but the point is, throwing the game plan away straight away in favour of some ideal is *not* going to work. You have to stick in it as long as you can and keep hoping to find that edge that'll prove you're /not/ the underdog in the matchup, or to realize that you were called the underdog for a reason, and you're going to lose.

=]

In other words, point expectation on an offensive ...

2009-11-25T15:43:54.205-05:00

In other words, point expectation on an offensive or defensive possession is based on the underlying 0/3/7 score probabilities. Much as it seems to make some intuitive sense that ostensibly risky strategies such as blitzing and throwing deep should simultaneously raise the probability of scoring/allowing either 0 or 7 points on a possession, this doesn't make sense unless there's a compensating decrease in the probability of 3. While this may indeed be the result of such strategies to some degree, it seems as if it would apply disproportionately to play selections near the edge of field goal range. And these strategies still suffer the drawback of tending to increase the number of possessions, so it's really not clear to me that their use tends to benefit the underdog at all. In any case, I think it should be made clear in the article that the prescription applies primarily to this region of the field. Otherwise, it looks as if we're just superposing mathematical models onto the question without considering how they actually interact with football reality.

I guess the other thought process to take into account is that these strategies might be affecting the transition probabilities: we take a bigger risk of incurring a field position deficit - thereby increasing the opponent's probability of scoring - in order to raise the probability of scoring ourselves. But I'm not sure that this really makes a difference. We're operating under the hypothesis that expected net points are not changing as a result of this strategy, and this is ultimately comes back to the 0/3/7 probabilities on offense and defense. Maybe the key intuition is that a given net point differential is less significant, in terms of pythagorean win probability, as the total number of points increases, so it makes some degree of sense for an underdog to aim in this direction. Though I still think this runs into the objection that increasing the number of possessions, when facing an expected deficit per possession, can never be a good thing.

I know I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but I'm really trying to understand why this conclusion would hold true, and not quite getting it yet.

With all due respect, I'm not sure that I buy ...

2009-11-24T17:44:33.053-05:00

With all due respect, I'm not sure that I buy some of the conclusions in this article. As others have noted, there are two components at work here when we talk about overall point variance: the variance of points in a possession, and variance in the number of possessions in a game. It seems that strategic decisions will primarily affect the latter category, and if we assume that higher-risk strategies tend to produce more possessions per game, then this works to the detriment of the underdog. (The converse of this is yet another reason why New England's refusal to go no-huddle in the SB was so baffling.)

Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't really make sense to speak of a team deliberately raising their standard deviation of points per possession, with the specific exception of strategies that will minimize the probability of a field goal without affecting overall point expectation. With that in mind, I certainly agree that underdogs should be more inclined to play for a touchdown instead of a field goal when it comes to fourth-down decisions, and play-calling near field goal range in general. But what does an underdog gain by blitzing and throwing deep? Either these plays increase point expectation, in which case they should be doing them anyway, or they will merely tend to raise the number of possessions in the game, in which case they are playing into the hands of the opponent.

Quick question based on yesterdays Cowboys/Chiefs ...

2009-10-12T12:25:28.184-04:00

Quick question based on yesterdays Cowboys/Chiefs game - what do your statistics say to you about going for the two point conversion versus kicking the extra point to tie the game (as the chiefs did with :24 remaining). I was somewhat surprised they didn't go for it, especially considering they were 0-3 at the time and a significant underdog. So my question incorporates the general statistical advantage of playing for overtime at home (questionable at best) versus the straight statistical probability that the offense can gain two yards on 4th down. Given the complexity of probabilities in playing for the tie and the dependency of those probabilities on outcomes not under your control (coin-flip), wouldn't ANY team be better off in this instance simply attempting the two point conversion? Or am I simply too overaggressive?

I ran the following with the data I have: When th...

2009-09-17T00:44:07.348-04:00

I ran the following with the data I have:

When the favorite is a 10-point or greater favorite, their SD was 10.2 with an average of 27.1 points scored.

When the favorite is a 3-point or less favorite, their SD was 10.1 with an average of 21.4 point scored.

When the underdog is a 10-point or greater underdog, their SD was 9.7 with an average of 19.5 points scored.

This is using data from the last 20 years.

I do not know if it is accurate to divide SD into average points, but if I did that, I'd get:

Fave of 10+ 37.7%
Fave of 3- 47.1%
Underdog of 10+ 59.2%
Underdog of 3- 49.8%

If this is an accurate way to look at it, then it seems that big underdogs may be playing with more volatility than big favorites.

Again, I concede I am missing something or I am not making a correct interpretation or doing a bad statistical leap...so please correct me when I'm wrong.

P.S. What years were your data from?

I may be missing something, but given that big fav...

2009-09-17T00:34:33.441-04:00

I may be missing something, but given that big favorites are expected to score a lot of points and big underdogs are expect to score very few points, shouldn't the Standard Deviation of big favorites naturally be higher than the SD of big dogs due to the level of the mean? For example, if a big favorite is expected to score 28 points, while a big underdog is expected to score only 10 points, shouldn't the SD around 28 be higher than the SD around 10 simply because 28 is much higher number than 10?

I concede there could be a very simple explanation that I do not understand. Please help me out if that is the case.

In the "In Practice" section, you note t...

2009-09-10T14:27:57.765-04:00

In the "In Practice" section, you note that the favorites tend to have a higher SD, when you'd expect them to play a lower-variance strategy. I wonder if this is related to the general fact that coaches seem to be too conservative on things like 4th down.

If you've established that coaches tend to be too conservative on 4th down calls, then better coaches will be more aggressive than average on those calls. This will make them win more games, and therefore be favorites more often, and it will increase their variance as well.

Brian, excellent column. I found your blog about ...

2009-09-08T17:43:28.302-04:00

Brian,
excellent column. I found your blog about a month ago and must say it is well-written.

As a long-time Madden and NCAA gameplayer, I've employed an underdog strategy of playing 4 downs every time past my own 45, calling lots of trick plays while using every second of the play clock every down. This has increased my chances of winning. Completely unofficial, but possibly interesting as an anecdote.

The 2008 Arizona Cardinals are a good example of a...

2009-06-10T04:36:58.465-04:00

The 2008 Arizona Cardinals are a good example of a team successfully following the strategies dictated in this column. Against their lousy divisional foes, the Cards were much more conservative than against the non-divisional opponents. They suffered numerous blowouts which caused pundits to see them as less capable of defeating elite teams than they actually were. In fact, their high risk/reward strategy prepared them beautifully for the playoffs where you must defeat a number of elite teams consecutively.

This is where teams like Baltimore and Tennessee tend to struggle. Their conservative approaches, which work so well during the regular season where most of their opponents are inferior, do not prepare them for the playoffs. The Steelers appear to be a similar team, but their QB/WR situation is much better suited for the risks often necessary in the playoffs.

Part of what makes the NFL so interesting also makes drawing conclusions from articles like this difficult. There are so many moving parts. However, it is worth noting that sometimes increased risk can dovetail with apparently counterintuitive strategies like slowing the pace. When an underdog goes for it on fourth down, that is in apparently risky strategy, but, when successfully executed not only allows them to retain possession but also succeeds in reducing overall possessions.

Although the high-variance strategy produces wins ...

2009-06-04T11:37:22.764-04:00

Although the high-variance strategy produces wins more often for the underdog, doesn't it also produce more heavy losses?

Coaches might be worried about the morale effects on the players of a heavy loss (and not just the effect on the fans and the owners!)

Michael-I agree. That was my recommendation for th...

2009-05-30T10:56:58.162-04:00

Michael-I agree. That was my recommendation for the Giants in the SB 2 yrs ago. The more iterations in a contest, the more likely the better opponent will come out on top.

Underdogs and Reducing Possessions Super Bowl XLII and Team Possessions

One thing I find interesting about this research i...

2009-05-30T10:41:50.183-04:00

One thing I find interesting about this research is how, in spite of many coaches inability to go against their own tendencies, it does actually reinforce certain strategic trends.

For example, how often do we hear during a season where a particular team is having an explosive offense that they "should consider running the no-huddle more often" so as to put pressure on the defense, gain favorable mismatches due to limiting personnel/formation adjustments that the defense can make, etc. I would say that this research actually enforces this line of thinking; if one team is across-the-board more talented than another, then increasing the number of opportunities to display that personnel/execution advantage (i.e. run more plays) would logically cause each team to move more towards its performance mean if you will.

So, in that, I think it is wise for an underdog to almost NEVER run a no-huddle offense (unless their offense is considered better than the other teams defense). With that said, the same said offense should then, as you said Brian, throw deep more often, run trick plays, perhaps use more unusual formations/motions/formation shifts, etc. but that the actual tempo of the game should be fairly slow.

I would be interested to look at teams during what would be deemed a dynasty era that "overachieved" early in their dynasty run (and see how their use of the no-huddle compared with that of their more dominant years later on. I am willing to beat we would see a faster tempo from the more talented team than the early team.

For example, the 2001 Patriots were, by most standards, considered a team that had mediocre, 8-8 type talent on their roster that went on to win a Super Bowl. I would be willing to beat that the 2007, 16-0 Patriots who were eventually upset by the N.Y. Giants ran the no-huddle significantly more than did the 2001 Patriots...ditto the 49ers of 1989-1990 versus 1981 (first championship of that dynasty, also won by a team considered not overly talented).

As both Bill Walsh understood and Bill Belichick understand the value of analysis of tendencies (both their own and the opposition's) and metrics in determining strategy, I bet both dynasties would provide interesting support for the no-huddle variance strategy I am speaking of.

In order to observe the variance in strategy based...

2009-05-29T00:25:31.256-04:00

In order to observe the variance in strategy based on point totals, I'd think you'd have to adjust for the fact that among mismatched teams, the strategies will likely change due to the current score as the game goes on. So it may be that if heavy favorites become more conservative later in the game as they build a lead (and thus underdogs take more risks) the numbers shown in the last table may actually understate the early-game strategic inefficiencies. However, as others have suggested, there might be other in-game strategy changes that affect the results.

Also, while I agree that in theory favorites should be more conservative off the bat and underdogs should take more chances, I don't think anyone has a clue how to modify your team's level of risk-taking without significantly changing your average point-scoring ability. In other words, by increasing its SD to 15 by employing a high-risk strategy, the underdog in your example may be reducing its average points to something so far below 17 that it becomes counterproductive. Recall that the Sackrowitz Chance paper on ball control offense found that the probability of winning is so sensitive to changes in scoring efficiency that underdogs attempting to deviate from optimal pace will likely reduce its ability to score too much to make the strategy worthwhile.

If you somehow defined "conservative" and "risky" decision making, you should be able to show using historical data that underdogs that took more chances did indeed increase their odds of winning (even unintentionally). And vice versa for favorites. But I'd bet that such an effect wouldn't show up empirically because the margin for error is so thin.

And of course, this is all complicated by overwhelming evidence that, when it comes to 4th down decisions anyway, teams don't make optimal choices in neutral situations to begin with.

I seem to remember them being much better than a "...

2009-05-28T11:58:33.397-04:00

I seem to remember them being much better than a "normal" sixth seed. They had superior personel and were coming off a 15-1 season.

More to the point, if you go back and watch those ...

2009-05-28T10:21:13.515-04:00

More to the point, if you go back and watch those playoff games in 2005, Whisenhunt had the Steelers come out throwing the ball, unlike their regular season strategy. If this is an indication of being an underdog (and they were, given they were the 6 seed), then maybe we're on to something for sure.

They definitely scaled back when Maddox got hurt b...

2009-05-28T10:14:41.277-04:00

They definitely scaled back when Maddox got hurt because of Ben's inexperience. I could be wrong, but I don't view Cowher as having much of a head for numbers. :)

@parker
Yeah, maybe. I think they definitely had the superior teams in the Super Bowls, but I'm not so sure it was the case in all the playoff games leading up to the championships, especially in 2005.

Oops, you're right Justin. I should've said that t...

2009-05-28T10:08:50.318-04:00

Oops, you're right Justin. I should've said that the Steelers won the Super Bowl in 2005.

While it's true that the Steelers, like most teams, run more when they're winning, I really think they tried to throw more in general with Maddox in 2002-2003, and Cowher did say that he wanted to build a more pass-heavy offense during that time. With the arrival of Big Ben, they switched back to a more conservative offense. Whether that was a choice based on the theoretically ideal strategy or a practical one based on having a young QB, I can't say. Probably some of each.

steelers fans, Since they won the championship wou...

2009-05-28T04:46:21.761-04:00

steelers fans,
Since they won the championship wouldn't you say they had the superior teams and therefore proved the article right.

Brian,
I was always looking for a way to put into numbers why rivalry games seem to have more unexpected outcomes. Thanks for this article.

Steelers fan here also. I'm pretty sure they run ...

2009-05-27T15:23:10.244-04:00

Steelers fan here also. I'm pretty sure they run when they're winning and pass when they're behind to catch up, but most teams do that.

And not to pick nits, but Roethlisberger went to the AFC Championship (again against the Pats) in his rookie season and won the Lombardi the following year.

The 2001-04 Steelers make an interesting example o...

2009-05-27T15:16:24.027-04:00

The 2001-04 Steelers make an interesting example on this topic. In '01, they were #1 in rush yds and #21 in pass yds. They lost to the Patriots in the AFC championship game, and Cowher admitted that this loss made him rethink how aggressive his offense should be. In '02 and '03, the Steelers switched from Kordell to Maddox at QB, threw more (~90 attempts/year more), and got worse. After a lousy '03, they put in a rookie QB, threw a lot less, and won the Super Bowl.

Obviously the issues are complicated (did they win because they run more, or did they run more because they won?), but Cowher definitely made the offense more aggressive in 02-03 and less aggressive in 01 and 04, and there's no question that the Steelers were a better team with the more conservative offense. (In this Steelers fan's eyes, anyway)