Have I Discovered Another Mathematical Football Coaching Error?

[VarlosZ]

I see your point, but that's different. It's one thing to make relatively minor (and obvious) mistakes, and thus earn a reputation as, say, a poor clock manager. The fans hate it and the GM is no doubt annoyed, but I think people in football realize that there's a lot happening on the sidelines and not much time to make these decisions, so errors are to some degree unavoidable.

OTOH, purposely and repeatedly making tactical decisions that cut so strongly against the established orthodoxy will get a coach a ton of negative attention. There isn't enough of an EV boost to overcome the confirmation bias that will cause every journalist, pundit, and fan to pick out the instances in which a novel strategy failed, just as they expected it to. And that's assuming that the strategies are yielding their true EV; god forbid variance strikes and the strategies backfire for a season.

That said, I imagine that some day a particularly enlightened and/or supportive front office will allow an experiment with some of these unorthodox tactics. In particular, I'd like to see a team eschew a majority of its punts; those would be fun games to watch.