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Old 11-30-2007, 04:41 PM
gumpzilla gumpzilla is offline
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Default Re: Have I Discovered Another Mathematical Football Coaching Error?

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didn't I show where the 2 pt conversion rate has been inversely related to the number of 2 pt attempts in a season?

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A link to a NYT article that contained the following sentence which you quoted:

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But a funny thing has been happening at the same time: offenses have regained the upper hand on conversion attempts.

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was the entirety of your evidence. Note that that is not a quantitative statement. If you were to show that the size of that effect was substantial enough to impact Sklansky's reasoning, that would be a good argument. What you are doing instead is waving your hands, and instead of saying something like "Here is a possible counterargument," you're saying "OWNED YOUR FACE OFF SLANKSY"

EDIT: What evidence is there that football coaches have thought through this mathematically? Anecdotally, it sounds like baseball has only recently gotten into sabermetrics, and that's a sport which seems like it has a considerably longer history of statistical analysis.

EDIT 2: Funnily, immediately after the sentence from the NYT article comes this piece of wisdom: "(Sackrowitz says teams now do not go for 2 often enough.)"
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