A few years back, the economist David Romer wrote an academic paper suggesting that teams in the N.F.L. should punt less frequently. While the league’s coaches mostly dismissed his findings, I suspect that teams are a bit more likely to go for it on fourth down in marginal situations today than they were before he wrote the article.
N.F.L. coaches may have laughed at Romer, but Kevin Kelley took note. Kelley is the football coach at Pulaski Academy, an Arkansas prep school, and his team no longer punts except to avoid running up the score. As Gregg Easterbrook reports on ESPN.com:
Kelley says that when he began to shun the punt, people thought he was crazy: “It’s like brainwashing, people believe you are required to punt.” Players and the home crowd needed to get acclimated to it. “When we first started going on every fourth down,” he says, “our home crowd would boo and the players would be distressed. You need to become accustomed to the philosophy and buy into the idea. Now our crowd and our players expect us to go for it, and get excited when no punting team comes onto the field. When my 10-year-old son sees N.F.L. teams punting on short yardage on television, he gets upset because he’s grown up with the idea that punting is usually bad.”
So far, it seems to be working pretty well. The Pulaski Bruins finished the regular season at 9-2-1 this year.
(Hat tip: Blake Howard)
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What about going for the 2-point conversion as opposed to the PAT as the default strategy? Even if a team converts the PAT %100 of the time, any 2-point conversion rate over %50 would make it the obviously superior choice in all but the most select situations. As the state of football conventional “wisdom” currently exists, the opposite is true. Of course, one of the fundamental ideas of Freakonomics is that “The conventional wisdom is often wrong”.
What about going for the 2-point conversion as opposed to the PAT as the default strategy? Even if a team converts the PAT %100 of the time, any 2-point conversion rate over %50 would make it the obviously superior choice in all but the most select situations. As the state of football conventional “wisdom” currently exists, the opposite is true. Of course, one of the fundamental ideas of Freakonomics is that “The conventional wisdom is often wrong”.
James (re: 2-point conversion),
You have to consider the marginal value of a point. At the end of a game, the one point you score that’s greater than your opponent has 100% of the value and all additional points are meaningless (except to gamblers). Likewise, failure to score that 1 point can have dire implications.
Over the course of a season (total points scored), your suggestion would be accurate, but it would not be an appropriate strategy for individual game management.
Note: I wonder my statement about would not hold true for a team like Texas Tech, who scores lots of points but lacks a stout defense. They have high scoring games, where lots of touchdowns allow for lots of 2-point attempts. This also depends on other factors (e.g., their red zone TD%), but might be an instance where hoping for 50% could work.
James (re: 2-point conversion),
You have to consider the marginal value of a point. At the end of a game, the one point you score that’s greater than your opponent has 100% of the value and all additional points are meaningless (except to gamblers). Likewise, failure to score that 1 point can have dire implications.
Over the course of a season (total points scored), your suggestion would be accurate, but it would not be an appropriate strategy for individual game management.
Note: I wonder my statement about would not hold true for a team like Texas Tech, who scores lots of points but lacks a stout defense. They have high scoring games, where lots of touchdowns allow for lots of 2-point attempts. This also depends on other factors (e.g., their red zone TD%), but might be an instance where hoping for 50% could work.
Regarding comment 1, the idea of more than 50% success only holds if the value of getting 2 points is always identical to the value of gaining 1 point twice. That is, even ignoring risk (which few coaches do) a 100% probability PAT will have a team better far better off than a 50% probability conversion, most notably late in the game (or a perceived late occasion for scoring) and when tied, trailing by one, three, or four (to set up the win, the tie, the FG win or the FG tie). Since so many situations in football do fall under this set of circumstances, it makes sense that the PAT is still the standard.
However, I do believe that use of the 2-point conversion attempt is probably still below equilibrium.
Regarding comment 1, the idea of more than 50% success only holds if the value of getting 2 points is always identical to the value of gaining 1 point twice. That is, even ignoring risk (which few coaches do) a 100% probability PAT will have a team better far better off than a 50% probability conversion, most notably late in the game (or a perceived late occasion for scoring) and when tied, trailing by one, three, or four (to set up the win, the tie, the FG win or the FG tie). Since so many situations in football do fall under this set of circumstances, it makes sense that the PAT is still the standard.
However, I do believe that use of the 2-point conversion attempt is probably still below equilibrium.
It appears Bill Belichick (who Easterbrook is not the biggest fan of) may be taking notice to this as well.
It appears Bill Belichick (who Easterbrook is not the biggest fan of) may be taking notice to this as well.