Going For It On 4th Down

Jonah Lehrer’s great science blog, “The Frontal Cortex”, took on the subject of going for it on 4th down. In a result that probably didn’t surprise anyone with any kind of statistical chops, turns out coaches are way too conservative in going for it on 4th.

As Lehrer writes:

So let’s say you are NFL coach, and you have a fourth and three on your opponent’s 30 yard line. Romer could tell you that 1) you have a 60 percent chance of getting a first down, and that teams with 1st downs inside the thirty yard line score a touchdown 40 percent of the time, for an expected point value of 1.7 and 2) that field goal attempts from the 32 yard line failed almost 65 percent of the time, which meant that going for a field goal only had an expected point value of 1.05. In other words, it’s almost twice as effective to go for it than to attempt a field goal.

Yet as Lehrer notes, in 2001, before UC Berkeley professor David Romer did this study, the average team went for it on fourth down 15.1 times per season. During the 2005 season, the average NFL team went for it on fourth down 14.5 times. The decision-making process has actually gotten worse in recent years.

There are two reasons coaches don’t follow this sound advice and go for it more on 4th down. One, as Lehrer notes, is that coaches are bad at using statistics to their advantage. The other reason is risk aversion.

It’s that second reason, risk aversion, where I think we need to go beyond simple hand-waving.

Someone needs to study the influence that media have on coaches getting fired or not. If there’s specific evidence to indicate that a bold coach who goes for it a lot and succeeds most of the time still ends up getting grilled for failing by media, to the point where short-sighted ownership takes notice and cans the guy, then there’s your (much bigger) disincentive right there.

As much as one can discuss tactics from the sidelines, most people, in any field, will do whatever it takes to cover their ass. It needs to be abundantly, breathtakingly clear to every coach that they won’t get roasted for going for it on 4th (even when it’s obviously right from a tactical perspective) before we’ll see significant change. Or better yet, it needs to be abundantly clear that getting roasted by the press for such decisions won’t have any meaningful impact on job security.

If I were a coach who wanted to be more aggressive on 4th down with my team, I’d do a few things before I was hired:

1) Have someone conduct that study to see how much impact media pressure has on coaches’ job security.

2) Have a tete-a-tete with the owner and GM, wherein I make clear that the biggest factor that sets me apart from other coaches is my reliance on probabilities, and that as a result I’ll be going for it on 4th down a lot, and that as a result they’ll be reading lots of nonsense from newspaper columnists the next day.

In any endeavor, it can take a long time to see true change. Sports teams will eventually copy someone else’s innovative style, but only when the coast is really, really, really clear. I suspect we’d need to see a coach go for it a lot more than the norm, succeed a lot, and either successfully dodge media criticism or successfully convince his owner that the media’s full of simpletons out to sell papers who wouldn’t know regression analysis if it bonked them in the head.

(Thanks to Dave and Ben K. for providing the inspiration for this post.)