There's a huge difference between what works at the professional level and what works at the collegiate level and what works at the high school level. A lot of it comes down to the difference in abilities between kickers and punters between those levels.<p>In high school some teams will always go for a 2 point conversion after a touchdown. Not because they will make it a large percentage of the time but because they will be lucky if their kicker will make the extra point 20 percent of the time.<p>In high school and college it makes sense to go for it on fourth down more often because most teams don't have punters that can consistently kick the ball 50 yards or down it inside the 10.<p>Professional kickers can consistently make a field goal from 40 yards, some have really good percentages from 50. An onside kick that fails almost gives the other team 3 free points in the pros. An if the receiving team is expecting it the percentage of the time it works be small. In high school, where you almost have to be at extra point distance to even think of trying a field goal, I could see it being useful.<p>Main point: The coaches at each level are, for the most part, acting rationally. The occasional deviation from the typical strategy is like a bluff in cards. You need to do it occasionally so that they can't gang up on your typical strategy.
This is just about the most absolutely bizarre thing in the world for me to see my High School football coach on the front page of Hacker News. I attended Pulaski Academy (PA) 6th-10th grade and played football there from 7th-10th grade, 1 under Coach Kelley who was then the Defensive Coach while I was a cornerback (and tailback).<p>As coaches go, Coach Kelley was smart, far smarter than any coach I had at Plano West, one of the premier school districts for football in Texas. He pushed us hard, had a great sense of humor, and was out to win. PA was also the best school I have ever attended (I also grew up in Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County, CA).<p>I guess what I'm trying to say is that while this is completely bizarre to find it on a Silicon Valley tech site like Hacker News, I honestly can't say I'm all that shocked. Sometimes when you meet people, you just understand and know that there's something different about them, a potential for greatness, that they are a mold breaker. Their current circumstances may be unexceptional, but you have confidence they will go on to do great things. I think this is of course what we (HN) share culturally with a football coach from Little Rock, AR: a desire to think outside the box, to break the mold, and achieve what little greatness we believe we are capable of achieving.<p>I owe a great deal of my professional success to Coach Kelley and Pulaski Academy, so seeing them realize this level of success by being different, smarter, fills me with pride and warms my heart.
My dad used to coach high school and college football way back in the 60's through the 80's. At one stop, there was a rival catholic high school that almost never kicked. No punts, always going for two on extra points and no field goals unless it was the end of the half or the end of the game. Their players and coaches were cocky about it, and beat my dad's teams more often than not, so my dad never liked them.<p>Thinking about it further, though, their style of play broke the other teams' game plans. In general, if a defense can hold the other team to 3 yards or less they win. (Because 3 yards times 3 downs equals 9 yards and a new set of downs is 10 yards.) By calling a play on 4th down, they lowered their standard of success to 2.5 yards per play. In startup terms, they extended their runway by 33%.
It's not just football where the strategies popular at the moment are probably sub-optimal.<p>Consider ice hockey. Most coaches, if down by a goal, will pull the goalie for an extra attacker with about 90 seconds left in the game. It turns out that pulling the goalie significantly earlier, with about 3 minutes left in the game, would be more likely to result in a win:<p><a href="http://people.stat.sfu.ca/~tim/papers/goalie.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.stat.sfu.ca/~tim/papers/goalie.pdf</a><p>However, coaches are understandably reluctant to pull the goalie so early. When they're down by a goal near the end of the game, they're probably going to lose regardless. The public accepts that. However, if they lose anyway after employing an unorthodox strategy, the critics will be vicious, much as described in the football article.
This really reminds me of the book Moneyball. What I found most interesting about that book and this sort of stats based management phenomenon is that it flies in the face of human nature and thus, people who are considered experts tend to reject such ideas.<p>What often happens is that people reject the ideas until they start winning or showing an obvious competitive advantage, then they embrace the ideas and they become the new standard way of doing things and people will parrot that as the one true way to do things as if it were always so.<p>I guess that is what progress looks like.
I'm from a country that has zero football and soccer is the king of everything. Some time ago I started watching football and really enjoyed both the physical tactical aspects of it. Been very busy though (had kids!), and never got to really study and learn more about the game (read a for dummies book and that was it - still have last year's superbowl game on media player to be watched). What would be a good, practical way (book/video/documentary) to learn about the game? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Reminded me of an article I read a few years back:<p><a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/060926" rel="nofollow">http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/...</a><p>"A year ago at the Hall of Fame reception in Canton, Ohio I found myself sitting between Bill Walsh and Don Shula. I posed this question: In a day when the Bears line up five-wide and Texas Tech passes 60 times a game, are there any fundamental innovations that have not been tried? Walsh supposed someone might try using trick formations for an entire game. Shula twinkled his eyes and said: 'Someday there will be a coach who doesn't punt.'"
One glaring miss in the statistical-only approach is that the psychology of a defense on 4th down and how that can impact outcomes. If you just use average net yards-play to extrapolate expected results for 4th down, or 3rd downs as per the berkely paper, thats not going to work out. Defenses will most certainly strategy to take more risks (and decrease the median expected yards gained in return for a small risk in a huge play), crowd noise can increase, etc.<p>The berkeley paper completely writes this off without evidence or reason, even with his assumption that offenses will not become more conservative with play calling, and its obvious a defense and crowd would act differently on 3rd and 3 than 4th and 3:<p>"Since it seems unlikely that the defense has substantially more scope than the offense to affect the distribution of outcomes"<p>Primarily, the goal on defense is to get off the field, so other than special situations like goal-line or the edge of field goal range, its ok to give up 3 yards and even 4 is fine. You really just need one great play out of 3 - a blocked or missed pass, tackle for loss, etc. and they're 3-and-out.<p>The paper admits the entire basis and math would be wrong if his assumption was misplaced:<p>"Thus using third downs to gauge what would happen on fourth downs would lead to overestimates of the value of going for it."<p>On 4th down and 1-3 yards, everything changes. You try to play every play as hard as possible, but you bring something special when its 'us or them, right here, right now'. Thats partially why (the other reason is there is less room to pass) that you see teams march down the field and can't get the last yard 4 tries in a row. I know the offense also steps up, but in a short running play against relatively even teams, defensive players are usually shorter (leverage) and have an extra player (unless the offense does wildcat with a mobile quarterback).<p>The other missing piece is they didn't seem to look at time left in the half and timeouts left. Punting in the first quarter is not the same as punting with 37 seconds and the other team is out of timeouts.
I am from a Little Rock, AR (went to PA's rival school), and when I saw the headline, I thought "oh, I know of a coach back home that does this." Little did I know he'd be brought up in an article on HN!<p>That being said, I'd be interested to see various modern machine learning and statistical techniques applied to football (as they have become applied to baseball).
Related: the basketball coach who always did a full-court press: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_...</a>
Reminds me of a story I read about a girls basketball coach who was not really familiar with basketball but I think he had coached soccer. He didn't understand why you would only defend half the floor, so he trained his players to run the floor like soccer players so that they could defend the entire floor all the time. Pissed off the opposing teams something fierce, but he did win a lot of games.<p>Edit: the story I recalled is the one already posted in another comment, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6729372" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6729372</a>
"There are those kinds of people that are different, becuase they want to be different. And there are those kinds of people that are different because they want to be successful" -Coach Kelley, from the video embedded in the link.<p>I think that is a very valuable lesson for us to take into startups, because so often we just want to "disrupt" things, but we don't have solid reasons for why disrupting something will lead us to being successful.
I have seen this story on E:60 before and actually think about it quite a bit in regards to the NFL. I think the reality is that most coaches would get roasted in the media if they tried and failed and playing the media is a big part of the NFL. ESPN is always looking to cause a distraction and then ask all of their commentators whether or not the 'distraction" is a distraction. But you do see coaches going for it when the benefit out ways the risk or they are feeling lucky. And I do think with the more mobile quarterbacks get the more you will see teams going for it based on the ability to do more.<p>This last Sunday, both Detroit and Chicago went for it on 4th down back to back drives. It was like one coach was challenging the other and I thought that was pretty cool. Ultimately if you look at these punters today though, most of them can put the ball on a dime with special spin to make it go where they want. Field position is tested strategy that works.
One major flaw to this article doesn't point out is that you may have a numbers advantage, as the coach and author suggests as the reason to why this works. Or, you may have a practice advantage against your opponent.<p>Practice advantage means that very rarely do teams practice their onside kick coverage or their 4th down defense on the opponents 12 yard line, because it just never happens. So the week before you play this team, your coaches will over index on the amount you practice onside kicks and 4th down coverage, meaning there will be a lot less time to practice for their actual offense and defense.
As a fan of rugby, I've often wondered why football coaches don't try some other radically different strategies. For example, why not use a lateral pass more? Usually football fans explain it by saying it's too risky. But in Rugby they do it all the time, it's a skill that can be practiced and be almost guaranteed of success if done correctly.
It's interesting to hear there's someone doing this. Nate Silver came to a similar conclusion at his Google Talk[1]. He proposed this as the answer to the question "What is the most statistically unsound tactic in sports?"<p>[1] <a href="http://youtu.be/mYIgSq-ZWE0?t=20m2s" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/mYIgSq-ZWE0?t=20m2s</a>
My feeling is that the automatic punt while you're up has also become a sportsmanship/etiquette thing now when your team is ahead.<p>If you're up by 2 touchdowns and you go for it on 4th, I can't think of a single announcer in the NFL who wouldn't make it seem like you were rubbing dirt in your opponent's face by doing so.
The paper he cites is by David Romer, but it definitely does not say you should go for it 100% of the time.<p><a href="http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/JPE_April06.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/JPE_April06.pdf</a><p>"Teams’ actual choices are dramatically more conservative than those recommended by the dynamic-programming analysis. On the 1,604 fourth downs in the sample for which the analysis implies that teams are on average better off kicking, they went for it only nine times. But on the 1,068 fourth downs for which the analysis implies that teams are on average better off going for it, they kicked 959 times."
To anyone who has been through the analysis/math: are fake punts considered "going for it"? I assume they are.<p>The following is possible: the surprise element of a fake punt makes going for it on 4th down more advantageous than it otherwise would be. It could make
P(good outcome | going for it on 4th down) > P(good outcome | punting) if and only if the defense expects a punt, which they no longer would if a team adopts the strategy of routinely going for it on 4th down.
I wonder how much of this is total commitment. If there is no punt, the offense is really forced to make it happen or put the defense in a terrible spot - does that change their mindset to be more gritty, more concentrated - more "these 10 yards has to happen"?
As a CFL fan, I'm wondering how these approaches would work up in Canada. It does seem that most CFL teams go on 3rd and one (easier since the defence has to give up a yard from the ball unlike US football) now, even in their own end.
Never would of thought I would see something from the Grantland channel on HN. Yet here we are. For those more into sports, especially BBall. Listen to Jalen Rose's podcast. Real insightful information and fun stories to hear.
You know, if punting was just eliminated from the game, it would be a ton better from a fan perspective.<p>I say take it away for everyone and make 'em play all four downs!
Never punting and always doing onside kicks is nothing new. I've been doing that in NFL blitz for years.<p>Always going for the 2-point conversion is the real secret.
High school play obviously has strategies that aren't appropriate for higher stakes or at a higher level of play: There are a lot of silly plays that high schools do that you'll never see in the professional leagues, aside from pro bowl level frivolity.<p>It's worth noting that this isn't about "going for it" on the 4th down, but instead about trying onside kicks. I mention that because one of the academic papers linked (by David Romner) is specifically about going for it on 4th down, and it doesn't say not to punt, but rather that <i>on the average</i> there are are many situations where teams punt when odds favor going for it on the 4th down (e.g. 4th and inches at your own 30 yard line. Aside from the last minutes of the 4th quarter down 6 points, the vast majority of teams would punt it).