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Frank Reich and 4th down..


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2 minutes ago, GoatBeard said:

Well i felt like you were indirectly talking to me because Ive posted a lot in this thread and suggesting Im some old fashioned goof that scoffs at the progress of analytics, which is only partly true. I personally think it has ruined the intrigue in the NBA, but thats abother story altogether. But I do understand WHY they are using it. They see it as a cheat code. A way to produxe more points on much less work. I was just a big fan of that work so I dont care for it.

 

So maybe I over reacted a little lol

 

Anyways, i dont mind the data. The data isnt complicated at all. Applying it to the game is very complicated. Using it effectively is far from easy. And I am only speaking to people who misuse it.

 

 

Well, that's why those are multibillion dollar entertainment businesses that pay millions to their employees who are some of the best in their fields - from the football side itself(coaches, FO execs) to medical staff to data and analytics professionals. It's not easy, but they pay a lot of money to people who are generally very good at their jobs. 

 

IMO the NBA changed not because it's a "cheatcode to produce more points on much less work". It changed because if it didn't they'd all be out of work once a few of them decided to actually try to optimize efficiency. 

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2 minutes ago, SteelCityColt said:

 

That's not quite how it works regarding you blackjack take.

 

It's a 1% edge to the house of Basic Strategy is followed. So yes, if the 'wrong' choice is made is skews the odds. There isn't knowing when to take a chance or not as nonsense is the best way to play the game...

 

However, BJ is somewhat unique (or used to be) in that it has a 'memory' in that hands are impacted by previous hands. That's where card counting comes in. BUT you don't go away from playing nonsense, you just bet more on hands where the count is good. But hugely varying your bet makes you stand out like a sore thumb. Especially when dealers likely know the count too. 

 

*Source - I used to be a croupier.

 

Football is a much more complex multifactorial system. But the same premise applies. If you have enough data to give you a positive expected value (EV) for a choice in a certain situation, over the long term you win if you stick to it. But in football terms you're applying a overall probability that won't be fully tuned the actual down's circumstances. Match ups, weather, what the QB had for dinner. 

 

Not so much statistical mumbo jumbo, more it's often badly explained/understood. 

 

 

It is, and I totally get your point, but I used BJ because its an analytical guys' wet dream. Counting cards IS analytics and there is no better example of analytics being used effectively. But its still very hard despite being straightforward and simple.

 

If you know how many decks you are using and can mentally keep track of what cards youve seen you can determine whats left and calculate your odds of getting favorable cards in the future.

 

My point is merely that its purely subjective and can be used in error, with catastrophic results.

 

Especially in football, which is much more complicated 

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12 minutes ago, stitches said:

Well, that's why those are multibillion dollar entertainment businesses that pay millions to their employees who are some of the best in their fields - from the football side itself(coaches, FO execs) to medical staff to data and analytics professionals. It's not easy, but they pay a lot of money to people who are generally very good at their jobs. 

 

IMO the NBA changed not because it's a "cheatcode to produce more points on much less work". It changed because if it didn't they'd all be out of work once a few of them decided to actually try to optimize efficiency. 

You are leaving out the fact the rules have changed to favor the new style. The league itself wanted more scoring and teams adjusted their style to the new rules. If the rules were the same the style of play wouldnt be nearly as effective. 

 

And guys dont play as hard in the NBA today so its definitely a side effect.

 

Im personally not a fan of players throwing up low percentage shots just because they are more productive.

 

I want to see people compete. I want to see contrast in styles, strategy, etc.

 

I used to be a season ticket holder and rarely go to games anymore.

 

And you can believe what you want. But the games now, the atmosphere and the level of enjoyment for the fans have at the games is nowhere near what it was 25 years ago.

 

I ised to be in market square arena and couldnt hear myself talk. Now I go to the fieldhouse and can comfortably carry on a conversation with the person sitting next to me.

 

Because its boring and nobody is truly excited. 

 

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, JMichael557 said:

I coached football for a long time and punting a football is one of the worst decisions a coach can make. A punt is a turnover no different than a fumble or an interception. You are giving the ball to the other team. On any 4th and 1 you should have at worst a 90@ coversion rate. Why give the ball to the other team when they only have a 10% chance of sucess. What you have to combine is the statistic for making a first down wiht the statistic of the other team scoring once you punt. Lets say you are on your own 20 4 and incheds with a 95% chance of converting (the only thing that would stop the conversion would be basically a bad snap). If you put the ball on a net 40 yard put they get the ball aroung their 40 yard line where that have a least a 50% chance of getting a field goal.   You are much better off going for the first down. 

 

A coach should never punt unless the odds of not making a first down are under 50% assuming normal game conditions. (i.e. up 4 points and have 4and 5 on your 40 1:00 to play you punt and play the odds that they cannot score a td).   

 

Never voluntarily give the ball back to the other team. 

Gregg Easterbrook, who used to write the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column back in the day, agrees with you.  In fact, he favored never punting at all.  Ever.  At the very least, the 4th down on the 49 yard line nearly qualified for Easterbrook's "Preposterous Punt" zone.  His reasoning was if your punt results in a touchback, bringing the ball back to the 20, there's a decent chance that the opponent could move the ball right back to where it is now in two plays.  Why not go for it on 4th down?

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16 hours ago, GoatBeard said:

"The numbers strongly favored going for it here -- by a factor of 6.6 percentage points in expected win probability value -- in what was one of just two recommended go-for-it fourth-down scenarios on the night for Indy. (The other was a fourth-and-4 call later in this drive, when the Colts appeared to take a delay-of-game penalty in an effort to bait the defense into going offsides before punting.) The offense had a 68 percent chance of converting in what was, according to NGS ball-tracking technology, a true 1-yard to go situation, and the expected win probability with a conversion was set at 60 percent. If the Colts punted, their expected win probability would have dropped to 47 percent."

 

This is the kind of stuff I have a problem with, because its pretty misleading. Its a lot of statistical mumbo jumbo.

 

We didnt do it, and we still won. The key is knowing when to do it and the sheet cant tell you that. 

 

And the variance of why its been effective in other situations probably depends far more on the players and teams involved and is totally not transferrable to a blanket view of what the statistics actually mean. 

 

Its like this......You technically have a 49% chance to win a hand of blackjack. But the house wins a hell of a lot more than 51% of the money.

 

How is that possible? Because decisions have to be made and knowing when to take a chance and when to play it safe is still the key to winning.

 

At a certain point a statistic is only a record of what already happened, not a predictor of what WILL happen.

 


They did go for it on the example above though. 
 

They just referenced the other time, but didn’t list the win probability difference. I assume it was a much smaller delta than the time they did go for it. I actually would be interested to know how that 4th and 4 was a good time to go for it because getting 4 yards in that weather was tough.

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3 hours ago, lollygagger8 said:

Analytics can't be the only thing coaches base decision on. (or really anyone in real life decisions) 

 

Have to look at how the team has been playing against said opponent (what has been working/what hasn't) in that particular game. 

That's what they do in baseball.  Individual matchups between a pitcher and a hitter.  They compare the success of hitters against certain pitchers, and visa versa. 

 

The success of the pitcher or the hitter is not dependent upon the jobs 14 or 15 other players are doing at the same time.

 

Lots of idiosyncrasies in football.  

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2 hours ago, GoatBeard said:

A lot of the advocates dont want to admit that a lot of it is related to the explosion of fantasy football and the industry that surrounds that,  and companies marketing these stats as giving you an edge in that hobby. The more stats you can offer in that industry, the better you look to consumers. Whether or not they are truly valuable isnt very relevent.

Yup, and they tie the use of their products with the word "smart".   A person is smarter if they use analytics.  When in fact, the industry of processing stats is a money making industry on its own....of course they want their customers to think of themselves as being smarter than the folks who don't use their products.  Its a common sense marketing ploy.   Young males tend to be influenced by that kind of product/image association.  Not to go OT, but Congress had to step in when it involves something harmful, like Cigarettes.

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1 hour ago, SteelCityColt said:

That's why you calculate expected value (points) not just a win/lose succeed/fail for the trials. 

Ok but we are getting into the weeds there.

 

"Expected value" is not a term I personally like the sound of, and to me, seems like a way of polishing a turd. 

 

Im more of a "if I make this decision and it works, this is what I get as a result" type of guy.

 

Handling the unexpected is a key to winning and what seperates coaches from good coaches. And creating your own adversity is never a good thing. 

 

Heres the simplest way I can explain it.....

 

So, if I am up 14 in the 3rd quarter and decide to go for it on 4th down and 1, because I like the matchup and i dont think they can stop me, and Im successful........did I win because I went for it on that 4th down? Maybe not. But the stat still gets charted and used down the road to suggest that decision heavily weighted my odds of winning......when in reality it was likely completely insignificant.

 

These decisions are usually made when you deem the odds favorable, so is it even a true representation of the odds when hou apply it to every situation? Of course not.

 

 

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1 hour ago, shasta519 said:


They did go for it on the example above though. 
 

They just referenced the other time, but didn’t list the win probability difference. I assume it was a much smaller delta than the time they did go for it. I actually would be interested to know how that 4th and 4 was a good time to go for it because getting 4 yards in that weather was tough.

Im talking about the 4th and 4 call they suggest improved our odds of winning by 13%.

 

We took a delay of game and punted in that sequence.

 

EDIT: I believe they are actually referring to that sequence because the numbers at the bottom of that section dont represent the 6.6% difference in win probability they referenced in the beginning of that section, which is what I took to represent the other scenario.

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4 minutes ago, GoatBeard said:

Ok but we are getting into the weeds there.

 

"Expected value" is not a term I personally like the sound of, and to me, seems like a way of polishing a turd. 

 

Im more of a "if I make this decision and it works, this is what I get as a result" type of guy.

 

Handling the unexpected is a key to winning and what seperates coaches from good coaches. And creating your own adversity is never a good thing. 

 

Heres the simplest way I can explain it.....

 

So, if I am up 14 in the 3rd quarter and decide to go for it on 4th down and 1, because I like the matchup and i dont think they can stop me, and Im successful........did I win because I went for it on that 4th down? Maybe not. But the stat still gets charted and used down the road to suggest that decision heavily weighted my odds of winning......when in reality it was likely completely insignificant.

 

These decisions are usually made when you deem the odds favorable, so is it even a true representation of the odds when hou apply it to every situation? Of course not.

 

 

 

Expected Value is purely a mathematical term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

 

I had to remove your analogy, not just because it was completely off base, but also well over the line in terms of site rules. 

 

No one is saying go purely off the numbers, because football is too complicated to model perfectly for that given situation. One dice roll is not the same as another dice roll. But over a large enough sample size you will get regression to the mean, so for a given down/distance you can calculate the EV of points. This applies more for short 4th downs in the red zone, and seeing if the EV is getting greater than a FG.

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10 minutes ago, SteelCityColt said:

 

Expected Value is purely a mathematical term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

 

I had to remove your analogy, not just because it was completely off base, but also well over the line in terms of site rules. 

 

No one is saying go purely off the numbers, because football is too complicated to model perfectly for that given situation. One dice roll is not the same as another dice roll. But over a large enough sample size you will get regression to the mean, so for a given down/distance you can calculate the EV of points. This applies more for short 4th downs in the red zone, and seeing if the EV is getting greater than a FG.

No it wasnt offbase at all and thats ridiculous lol it was actually a great analogy.

 

Look this is something people do. You are now talking about a specific analytic in a specific situation, when I am speaking about a blanket application of it. And youre essentially agreeing with me mildly while still suggesting Im wrong. 

 

People dont go for it unless they already deem it favorable because of the matchup. So if you have a poor matchup the analytic is completely irrelevent and incomplete. That was the purpose of my filthy analogy lol and it was totally applicable.

 

A solid data point is universal. And those decisions arent universal at all. If the Detroit Lions make the same decisions as the Green Bay Packers they will not get the same results.

 

 

And yes, JMichael said to purely go by stats. The article also suggested to follow the numbers.

 

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1 hour ago, GoatBeard said:

Im talking about the 4th and 4 call they suggest improved our odds of winning by 13%.

 

We took a delay of game and punted in that sequence.

 

EDIT: I believe they are actually referring to that sequence because the numbers at the bottom of that section dont represent the 6.6% difference in win probability they referenced in the beginning of that section, which is what I took to represent the other scenario.

 

I think it was just written in a confusing way. They called out the 4th and 4 in parentheses as an aside...and then went back to talking about the 4th and 1.

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52 minutes ago, GoatBeard said:

 

People dont go for it unless they already deem it favorable because of the matchup. So if you have a poor matchup the analytic is completely irrelevent and incomplete. That was the purpose of my filthy analogy lol and it was totally applicable.

Correct. The coach has the same goal as the analyst, determining the likelihood that 4th down would be converted.  He "calculated" the likelihood of converting, by processing actually more facts than the amount of facts that can be loaded into a program...the facts he observed unfolding during the game.

 

What the analytics guys will tell you is that his intuitive method is fraught with wrong observations and bias, so we need to discard intuitive individual based conclusions and listen to them...the people who can process facts better....IOW, the experts.  LOL. ( See where this is heading on a grand scale..big brother?)

 

The human brain is a pattern recognition machine that processes useful facts and discards less useful facts in a TOTALLY objective way because it wants to make the right conclusion.  Objectivity is in its self interest because getting it right is better than getting it wrong, and its baked into our instincts (the only way it gets biased is through conditioning).  So the coach processes the more useful facts....IOW, what is happening in his game....and discards the less useful facts about what happened with two other teams in a game 3 weeks ago...and computes a "probability" based upon the more relevant and timely set of facts. (or observations)

 

Ultimately, the argument comes down to how people process information and what they feel comfortable using as a means to make decisions.  Some need to reduce every decisions into a spread sheet that can be explained.  Others use their pattern recognition and "intuition" and are comfortable with it.  Neither is better than the other, but it does get annoying when its presented as one being better than the other.

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4 minutes ago, hoosierhawk said:

Did you question him going for the 2 point conversion so early in the game Sunday?

No. Cherry picking specific decisions is the armchair coach method. I take his body of work....which includes massive QB change, remarkable injuries to important offensive positions, plus an OC change. Frank is a great coach. Extremely happy he is head coach in Indy. 

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6 hours ago, JMichael557 said:

I coached football for a long time and punting a football is one of the worst decisions a coach can make. A punt is a turnover no different than a fumble or an interception. You are giving the ball to the other team. On any 4th and 1 you should have at worst a 90@ coversion rate. Why give the ball to the other team when they only have a 10% chance of sucess. What you have to combine is the statistic for making a first down wiht the statistic of the other team scoring once you punt. Lets say you are on your own 20 4 and incheds with a 95% chance of converting (the only thing that would stop the conversion would be basically a bad snap). If you put the ball on a net 40 yard put they get the ball aroung their 40 yard line where that have a least a 50% chance of getting a field goal.   You are much better off going for the first down. 

 

A coach should never punt unless the odds of not making a first down are under 50% assuming normal game conditions. (i.e. up 4 points and have 4and 5 on your 40 1:00 to play you punt and play the odds that they cannot score a td).   

 

Never voluntarily give the ball back to the other team. 

Were you the coach who made the news for never punting the ball even on your own 10 yard line .

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3 hours ago, Superman said:

 

How could you possibly know? If you haven't taken the time to absorb and analyze this data, then how can you know that it's being misinterpreted?

 

What you're saying is that the interpretations you're seeing don't agree with your long held viewpoint, which means those interpretations must be wrong, even though you don't know the information upon which those interpretations are based.

To be fair neither do you. By all means correct me if I'm wrong here but help clear this air for me. Quoted from the article...

 

"The numbers strongly favored going for it here -- by a factor of 6.6 percentage points in expected win probability value -- in what was one of just two recommended go-for-it fourth-down scenarios on the night for Indy. (The other was a fourth-and-4 call later in this drive, when the Colts appeared to take a delay-of-game penalty in an effort to bait the defense into going offsides before punting.) The offense had a 68 percent chance of converting in what was, according to NGS ball-tracking technology, a true 1-yard to go situation, and the expected win probability with a conversion was set at 60 percent. If the Colts punted, their expected win probability would have dropped to 47 percent."

 

numbers - vague, and point to nothing concrete that we can verify or refute. Which numbers are they referencing and how were they compiled? What is the time frame of this data set? What is the scope of the data set? What is the sample size?

 

68% chance of converting - number with zero context. 68% of what? 68% of TEAMS in this situation? 68% of times in the past with similar down/distance? What percentage of that 68% success were pass vs run? Whats the success rate on the other pass vs run? Is that 68% COlts specific? If so, to what time frame? This year only? Last year? Frank Reichs tenure? Which QB's under Reich then? How does the offensive line lineup affect that 68%?

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I like Reich as a coach, I like a coach that has the balls to go for it on 4th down. That shows he has faith in the offense in getting it and as a QB Wentz has to love it, I would. Is he a perfect coach, no and he makes blunders but all coaches do. His record since he has took over speaks for itself:

 

2018 = 10-6, overall 11-7 he won a playoff game, we crushed Watson.

 

2019 = 7-9, Luck had just retired, we had a backup QB playing all year and still nearly went .500.

 

2020 = 11-5, 11-6 overall but we gave the Bills a huge scare in the playoffs.

 

2021 = 3-4, not bad considering our schedule.

 

Totals = 32-26 = above average at worse. 

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1 hour ago, GoatBeard said:

Ok but we are getting into the weeds there.

 

 

 

So, if I am up 14 in the 3rd quarter and decide to go for it on 4th down and 1, because I like the matchup and i dont think they can stop me, and Im successful........did I win because I went for it on that 4th down? Maybe not. But the stat still gets charted and used down the road to suggest that decision heavily weighted my odds of winning......when in reality it was likely completely insignificant.

 

 

 

 

The defense stuff the attempt and the opponent takes over on downs at your 30 yard line.   They score on the next play and get the 2 point conversion to cut your lead to 6 in the 3rd quarter.

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