[MicroBob]

Those who argue that you should take a 3 tend to flatly look at 3-point percentages and argue that the chances of making them so good that you should do that instead.
They fail to realize that a FORCED 3-pointer has a far lesser chance of success. It's apples and oranges. The guy that makes 40% of his 3-pointers all season long did so because he took them when the shot was open.

If you set things up in the situation with 30 seconds left to "get the ball to Miller because he's 40% to make this 3-pointer" then you are missing the point because he's almost definitely not going to be 40% in that forced situation.


The stats-geeks have been invading baseball and have been changing strategies the past few years.
I believe the same will happen in football with such scoring-decision situations in the years to come.
There are some coaches who are less afraid to take chances and may have some possiblity of actually getting this stuff.
As I've said before in other threads about this...some teams actually have some pretty smart players.
MIT has a football team I believe. So do Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford among other schools. Surely there have to be some math majors on some of these teams who could understand something like this and maybe even one or two of them could become a coach in the future.

As I recall, an assistant coach at James Madison who is in a wheelchair has posted on these forums and is a poker player. I forget his name but he linked to an article about himself that was pretty impressive.
So he understands the general idea of EV and poker concepts, etc and is an assitant coach on a Div 1-AA team.

Getting the picture? Not ALL of these guys are total jock idiots as the perception goes.
And some of them are much bigger risk-takers then you might think. It's not all conservative play-calling either.

If there's an edge to be had and they can actually learn that it is real then they will indeed go for it. It's only a matter of time.