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February 01, 2004
Winners Never Punt; Tenure for Coaches
Posted by Nick
Tyler Cowen points to a paper I'd been meaning to write about for some time. Economist David Romer says football teams punt too much. Tyler says:
The real question is why this mistake was made in the first place. Could it be the economist's well-known distinction between the seen and the unseen? If you punt, no one sees the first down you didn't make. If you don't punt and fail to make a first down, you feel bad and are easily blamed.
This is probably right, and it's not just in football. Ask Grady Little, who was fired by the Red Sox after going against conventional wisdom and keeping Pedro Martinez in too long against the Yankees in the 2003 playoffs. This was called managing with your heart and not your head. Had a reliever been burned instead, Grady might still have his job.
Of course, Yankee skip Joe Torre left Mariano Rivera in the final game against the Sox far longer, it could be argued, than he "should" have and, by taking that risk and winning, he looked like a genius.
Maybe the solution to all this is to give managers and coaches what Tyler and David Romer and many of their compatriots have: some kind of tenure. That way they might be less risk-averse, having greater confidence to make what they truly believe is the right decision every time.
Imagine that: Earl Weaver, tenured radical.
UPDATE: Robert Tagorda says the Super Bowl -- the ultimate pressure cooker -- makes risk-taking unlikely.
Comments (6)
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Nick Schulz is the Editor of Tech Central Station and has worked in media circles and the ideas industry as a writer, editor, television producer and policy analyst. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The National Post of Canada, The Baltimore Sun, Investor's Business Daily, The Washington Times, National Review, Reason, Policy Review, and several other publications. He is also, it should be said, a rabid sports fan whose fandom is inversely proportional to his overall athletic ability.
1. Chris on February 1, 2004 12:37 PM writes...
The only thing that could have saved Grady's job was a World Series win. The Sox have gone with a much more analytical , sabermetric type of culture, and Grady just doesn't fit in there.
BTW, was screaming at the TV to bring Williamson in :)
Permalink to Comment2. stan on February 2, 2004 01:18 AM writes...
Romer's essential point is correct -- the value from keeping possession is underestimated while the value of field possession is over-rated. His actual charts are not very useful because they rely on overgeneralizations and third down data which isn't necessarily accurate when used to predict fourth down results.
The reason coaches make this mistake is due to the evolution of the game. In the days of low scoring football, field position was extremely important. Teams with a superior punter could use several exchanges of punts to move the ball down the field. Today, 1 or 2 passes easily nullify 35 yards of field position gained from a punt.
Just like with the "CHART" which coaches use to decide to go for two (see John Fox's stupid moves tonight), conventional conclusions haven't changed as the underlying risk/reward factors changed.
Permalink to Comment3. Daniel on February 2, 2004 10:59 AM writes...
The New York Times ran an article about this paper in yesterday's Times. The URL is: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/weekinreview/01foot.html, if MT strips out the URL, the title of the article is "Super Bowl Economics: Incremental Analysis, With Two Yards to Go."
Permalink to Comment4. JC on February 2, 2004 12:04 PM writes...
On the John Fox chart, I too was a bit surprised to see the Panthers go for 2 so early in the fourth. However, after the game Fox said something I had never heard, his chart is based on score differential PLUS time remianing in the game. This sounds like something Belichick would do. So, I in fairness to John it sounds like someone on his staff calculated the expected marginal value of the points for this given situation and the two-point risk was worth taking. I am not saying his calculations were right, but according to him he did take time into account.
Permalink to Comment5. Aaron on February 2, 2004 02:20 PM writes...
IF you enjoyed this report and the associated article in the New York Times, you may want to read some of the research on our website FootballOutsiders.com. (I'm one of the people quoted in the NYT article.)
Permalink to Comment6. fling93 on February 2, 2004 07:33 PM writes...
I recall seeing somewhere a very concise way to put this phenomenon: "Better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally," and that's cuz you are never punished for the former.
stan: The reason coaches make this mistake is due to the evolution of the game. In the days of low scoring football, field position was extremely important.
I think it would still happen this way even if the game hadn't evolved from that, because of the seen and unseen effect. If you punt and the other team fails to score, nobody remembers that. If you try for it on 4th down, fail, and then the other team scores, everybody remembers that. And the thing is, you'll never know if they still would have scored anyway if you'd punted (or, in the case of this past Super Bowl, had Kasay not kicked the ball out of bounds).
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