The Two Point Conversion When Eight Down

[MyTurn2Raise]

sigh...football coaches are also adapting like baseball ones

you know how?

They are going for 2 less often
*this should be a huge wake-up call to the assumptions underlying this thread


This thread should be about 'experts' who apply frames from other fields to fields where they do not apply and fail miserably.

[FishSticks]

Tom Cowley -

Geez - you should approach an NFL franchise with this valuable information. They'll probably hire you on the spot.

FYI is there are 2 seconds left to play the game is quite likely to end on the ensuing kick. Why do you keep talking about going for 2 when down by 8? If it's late in the game and you're down by 8, you always go for 2. What are you talking about? The whole assumption that the 42% figure can be directly applied to a specific gametime decision is severely flawed, and that's the basis of this little algebra problem.

The way so many in this thread think they somehow know better about ANY aspect of football than NFL HEAD COACHES is absurd. I'm sure we'd all have a great laugh at a few random NFL players debating poker strategy and the foolish airs of authority and knowledge they'd assume in their discussions.

Yes, the algebra DS posed is sound. No, it's relevance to actual football decisions is not as sound. You want to argue math, but the actual application of these figures is based on arguing football.

[Thremp]

MT2R,

This isn't even the biggest error. Punting is much bigger of an error in most situations. Its been corrected by those "crazy" coaches such as Weis and Carroll in college. Too bad the pros can't pick it up.

[numbnuts007]

I've got to echo fish sticks on this one,

I think part of sklansky's point was that some people held out to be "experts" repeatedly make incorrect decisions from one perspective or another, in this situation mathmematics. I think that the example used is tremendously over simplified to prove this point. Mathematically, given that statistics, I'll accept the premise as true, but as a coach, there are far too many variables in a football game to rely entierly on the sum of the statistics of games of the past. In addition I would argue that these statistics are likely skewed because teams are more likely to go for two if their coach feels they have some type of advantage over the other team. Whether that advantage is momentum, home field advantage or whatever. But for a coach to look at a situation and say, "I can think of a million reasons why this is a bad decision, but math (and david sklansky) says i should go for it, so i'll just put everything on the line because that's enough for me." is foolish. Football is possibly the most complex, team oriented sport/game ever played. To reduce it to addition and subtraction is just silly.

As an aside, i found it funny that one of the things i've been reading alot about in my poker studies lately is just how situational of a game it is. There are numerous variables that go into every decision. But when it comes right down to it, there are 52 cards and ~9 players (add more if you want to factor in players in a tourney). Football, at a very basic level, involves all the physics that 22 very fast and strong men have on each other and a ball. In my opinion, more complex than the game of poker.

Sklansky, I love you man, but maybe you should give some deference to the "experts" in this case.

[TomCowley]

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Why do you keep talking about going for 2 when down by 8? If it's late in the game and you're down by 8, you always go for 2. What are you talking about?

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I guess this makes sense- I'm being flamed by somebody who hasn't even bothered to read the basic premise of the thread- going for 2 when you've just scored a TD to go from down 14 to down 8. Derf.


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FYI is there are 2 seconds left to play the game is quite likely to end on the ensuing kick.

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Really? No way. I thought another 30 points could be scored in there. Of course the odds of scoring a TD when kicking off with 2 seconds left are small, but no other result makes the previous kick/go for 2 decision relevant. If you don't score another TD, you're losing no matter what.

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The way so many in this thread think they somehow know better about ANY aspect of football than NFL HEAD COACHES is absurd.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ridiculous. What you're saying is that no lay person is EVER correct in his criticism of the EV of a coach's call. If you believe that, you may just be the dumbest person on this forum.

[TomCowley]

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This isn't even the biggest error. Punting is much bigger of an error in most situations. Its been corrected by those "crazy" coaches such as Weis and Carroll in college. Too bad the pros can't pick it up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. All the punts on 4th and 1 that aren't 1) Deep in your own territory or 2) a situation where reducing variance at the cost of cEV could reasonably be +$EV just make me mad.

Going 4th and 1 at midfield should be the default play, and punting should be a rare metagame deviation. Not only is it +EV as an "independent" play (hmm, we ended up here, guess we'll go for it now), but it opens up more offensive options on earlier downs if going for it can be planned for. That's even more +EV.

As for going for 2 in the first half, I've said since I was a kid that it's just awful, and that was intuitive understanding of the math. Hitting an important number (+/- 3, 7, etc) is all but meaningless in the first half (rising to very important late-game), and taking the higher pointEV play of kicking is correct. Early-game, the utility function of point differential is pretty smooth, but late-game, the utility function has much more uneven jumps and can outweighs the small pointEV difference in kicking vs. going for it.

[FishSticks]

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Ridiculous. What you're saying is that no lay person is EVER correct in his criticism of the EV of a coach's call. If you believe that, you may just be the dumbest person on this forum.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not what I'm saying. Let me make it crystal clear what I'm saying:

Tom Cowley you are an arrogant doucheprick with a chip on your shoulder, and you feel like you are smarter than everyone else. Your intellectual ego blinds you from the basic fact that you really don't know much at all about football, and you naively have the opinion that any true scholar with a mastery of math could enlighten many NFL head coaches on a variety valuable concepts. Although these ideas are quite rudimentary for you, you think they are simply beyond the grasp of many others. You reduce complex gametime decisions to crude EV calculations and algebra, when really the underlying math is insignificant in the decision process compared to the many human factors involved. Yes, based on the math DS provided his assumption is correct. No, 42% can never be blindly applied to any actual gametime situation, so the entire premise of your argument is severely flawed. If we could assume these numbers magically held true every time, then sure, it's a no brainer - but alas, that's just not how football works. Perhaps you should attend a few games and learn more before taking the stance that you could make better decisions that Belichick.

Arm chair quarterbacks are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Generally they debate decisions that other football minds have differing opinions about. What you're talking about is something that flatly no one in the NFL buys in to - if you could set aside your foolish pride for a moment you could understand the big picture instead of arguing algebra.

[TomCowley]

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Tom Cowley you are an arrogant doucheprick with a chip on your shoulder, and you feel like you are smarter than everyone else.

[/ QUOTE ]

Only half right. I am arrogant, but I don't have a chip on my shoulder, and I'm just sure I'm smarter than you, not everybody here. Nice try though.

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No, 42% can never be blindly applied to any actual gametime situation, so the entire premise of your argument is severely flawed.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't remember arguing that it is always correct fo go for 2 down 8. Quote where I did. The 42% average shows that it is extremely likely that situations do exist where going for 2 is correct. Of course there are situations where OT is a much greater than 50% proposition (the other team's offense has 3 key injuries). Of course there are situations where your own 2-point chance is much less than 42%. In those cases, kicking could well be correct. Conversely, if situations do exist where OT is less than 50 or 2-pt chance is >40% (with OT near 50) it is clearly correct to go for 2.

Your assertion that all coaches are aware of all nuances and mathematical expectations of going for 2 vs. kicking at all times is ridiculous. It's nothing but blind faith in a job title compounded by luckyme syndrome ignoring the background probability of an untrained person being bad at math.

Every coaching decision in football (and any other sport) is nothing more than an EV number. The number of factors involved make it impossible to model exactly, which is why coaches have to make decisions "by feel". The relative EV of CERTAIN decisions can be approximated to a high degree of certainty by simple mathematical models, and when a coach routinely makes a different decision in one of these scenarios "by feel", he is almost certainly making a lot of mistakes. Any individual deviation could be correct (lots of injuries being the simplest explanation), but a pattern of deviation without significant and exceptional circumstances is just bad coaching.

Nobody bought into sabremetrics in baseball for a long time, thinking they could do better managing by feel. Oops. It will take time, but the same will happen in football, especially with regard to punting. Somewhere, someday, a coach of a mediocre-to-bad team (with little to lose) is going to start going for it a lot more. When it works, better teams will pick it up incrementally until it's common practice. I suspect that a fair number of coaches already "know" that going more on 4th down is correct, but are afraid of the spectacular failures that will go along with the overall +EV.

[FishSticks]

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Tom Cowley you are an arrogant doucheprick with a chip on your shoulder, and you feel like you are smarter than everyone else

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Only half right. I am arrogant, but I don't have a chip on my shoulder, and I'm just sure I'm smarter than you, not everybody here. Nice try though.

[/ QUOTE ]

You forgot the important part, the part about you being a doucheprick. Nice try though.

I also doubt you are smarter than I am, and you sure must be insecure about your epeen to keep coming back to that.

You didn't argue it was always correct to go for it, you didn't really take a stance either way - you only ragged on my posts. I think the only opinion you've presented in this thread is that you don't agree with me. You don't really have anything to offer beyond that, it seems.

Flame on, cowboy.

[TomCowley]

I have nothing to contribute? You're the one who asked why I was talking about going for 2 down 8. You've contributed absolutely nothing except saying "LOL you guys think you're so smart, but football is complicated, so people with more football experience must be better at all football decisions, and they disagree with you, so you're wrong."

The reason coaches don't often go for 2 down 8 late is because they're bad at math. The reason they don't go for it more on 4th down is because the average fan is even dumber and more of a blind slave to conformity than you are.

Try something beyond namecalling and blind faith next time, like, maybe, citing sources with statistics or evidence in support of your position.

And my position is that it is often-to-usually correct to go for 2, but that circumstances can exist that make kicking correct.