Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

by L. Jon Wertheim

  GO FOR IT

  Why coaches make decisions that reduce their team’s chances of winning

  The sun retreated behind the hills on the west side of Little Rock on a warm Thursday in September 2009. The Pulaski Academy Bruins and the visiting Central Arkansas Christian Mustangs emerged from their locker rooms and stretched out on the field and applied eye black. Apple-cheeked cheerleaders alternated between practicing their routines and checking their backlog of text messages. The air was thick with concession stand odor. The PA blasted AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and the predictable medley of sports psych-up songs. A thousand or so fans found their seats on the bleachers, filing past the placards for a store called Heavenly Ham, Taziki’s Greek Tavern, and other local businesses and insurance agents. It was conventional stuff, in other words, a typical high school football tableau.

  Then the game started.

  On the first possession, Pulaski marched steadily downfield until it faced fourth down and five at the Mustangs’ 14-yard line. The obvious strategy, of course, was to attempt an easy field goal and be happy with a 3–0 lead. But without hesitation, the offense remained on the field and went for it. The quarterback, Wil Nicks, rolled left, looked for a blue jersey, spotted one of his five receivers, and zipped a swing pass near the sidelines that a junior receiver, Garrett Lamb, caught for a six-yard gain. First down.

  A few plays later, thanks to an intentional grounding penalty and a bad snap, Pulaski faced fourth and goal from the opponent’s 23-yard line. Again, conventional wisdom fairly screams: Attempt the field goal! Again, Pulaski did otherwise, going for it, lining up five receivers. Nicks was pressured out of the pocket and threw his ninth pass of the drive, a wayward throw, well behind the intended receiver, that fell innocuously to the turf. Central Arkansas Christian took over on downs.

  By the end of the first quarter, the Bruins had declined to punt or attempt a field goal on all four of their fourth downs, field position be damned. Then again, this wasn’t so surprising given that the team’s roster listed neither a punter nor a kicker among its 45 players. Nicks, the quarterback, had already attempted 15 passes, on a pace to eclipse the 50 tosses he’d thrown in his previous game.

  Early in the second quarter, Pulaski scored its first touchdown. After a nifty play fake, Nicks threw over the defense to a streaking receiver, Caleb Jones. On the ensuing kickoff, eleven Pulaski players massed near the 40-yard line. With the ball propped horizontally on the tee, resembling an egg on its side, the Pulaski players ran in different directions, as if performing an elaborate dance for which only they knew the choreography. With the play clock winding down, a burly senior tackle, Allen Wyatt, squirted a nine-yard kick that hugged the turf and bounced awkwardly before the visiting team pounced on the ball and hugged it like a long-lost relative.

  As one of the texting cheerleaders might have abbreviated it: WTF? Who ever heard of deploying an onside kick in the second quarter, much less when you aren’t behind?

  But none of it provoked surprise among the Pulaski fans. After the opponents fell on the ball, the Bruins jogged off as if nothing remarkable had happened. And in retrospect, nothing had. Turns out that after most of Pulaski’s touchdowns, the team went for a two-point conversion, not an extra point. On kickoffs, either they attempted fluttering onside kicks from any of a dozen formations or the designated kicker—who’s not really a kicker—would turn sideways and purposely boot the ball out of bounds, preventing a return.

  And the, um, avant-garde play-calling didn’t stop there. When Central Arkansas Christian punted, Pulaski didn’t position a man back, much less attempt a return. Instead, it chose to let the ball simply die on the turf. Pulaski threw the football on the majority of downs—except for third and long, when they often ran the ball. They sometimes lined up eight men on one side of the field. From a spread offense formation, they deployed crafty shuffle passes, direct snaps to the running back, end arounds, reverses, and an ingenious double pass. Pulaski often showed greater resemblance to a rugby team than to a football team.

  The players, not surprisingly, love it. What teenager who goes out for the high school football team wouldn’t be enthralled with a system that encourages passing on most downs, routinely racks up 500 yards a game in total offense, and is chock full of trick plays? “You can’t imagine how fun it is,” gushed Greyson Skokos, a thickly proportioned running back and one of four Bruins players who would go on to catch at least 50 passes in the 2009 season.

  The defensive players don’t mind it, either. Though they’re not on the field much, they welcome the challenge that comes when the offense fails to convert a fourth down and the opponent suddenly takes possession of the ball in the “red zone,” sometimes just a few yards from scoring. The Pulaski fans are accustomed to it by now, as well. Most enjoy the show, shake their heads, and almost uniformly refer to the team’s coach, Kevin Kelley, as a “mad scientist.”

  Truth is, Kelley isn’t mad at all. Quite the opposite. He’s relentlessly rational, basing his football philosophy not on whimsical experimentation or hot spur-of-the-moment passion but on cool thinking and cold, hard math.

  Playing high school ball in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1980s, Kelley watched in frustration as his conservative coach ordered the team to run on first and second downs, pass on third down, and punt or attempt a field goal on fourth down. To Kelley it made no sense: “It was like someone said, ‘Hey, it’s fourth down, you have to punt now.’ So everyone started doing it without asking why. To me, it was like, ‘You can have an extra down if you want it. No, I’ll be nice and just use three.’ ” At college at Henderson State, Kelley took a few economics courses, and though demand and supply curves didn’t captivate him—he ended up majoring in PE—he was intrigued by the thought of applying basic statistics and principles of economics to football. Within a few years, he had his chance. In 2003, he was promoted to head football coach at Pulaski Academy, an exclusive private school where Little Rock’s prominent families sent their kids. He decided to amass statistics and, based on the results, put his math into practice.

  Among his early findings: His teams averaged more than six yards per play. “Think about it,” he says. “[At six yards per play] if you give yourself four downs, you only need two and a half yards per down. You’re in great shape. Even if you’re in, like, third and eight, you should be okay. I’ll keep all four downs, thank you very much!” Kelley also realized quickly that using all four downs and breaking with hidebound football “wisdom” confused defenses, enabling his team to gain even more yards. “When third and seven is a running down and fourth and one could be a passing down, and defenses don’t know whether to use dime packages or nickel packages, the offense does even better.”

  Although Pulaski is hardly successful on every fourth-down attempt, it succeeds roughly half the time, enough to convince Kelley that statistically, his team is better off going for it every time. And keep in mind that this is without the element of surprise.

  According to Kelley’s figures, in Arkansas high school football, teams tend to average a touchdown on one of every three possessions. By punting away the ball three times when he didn’t have to, he’d essentially be giving the opponents a touchdown each game.

  By the time Pulaski played Central Arkansas Christian in September 2009, it had been more than two years since one of his teams had attempted a punt—and that was a gesture of sportsmanship to prevent running up the score. (Still more proof that no good deed goes unpunished, it was returned for a touchdown, cementing Kelley’s belief that punting is a flawed strategy.) Again, Kelley and his numbers: “The average punt in high school nets you around 30 yards, but especially when you convert around half your fourth downs, it doesn’t make sense to give up the ball,” he says. “Honestly, I don’t believe in punting and really can’t ever see doing it again.”

  He means ever. What about the most extreme scenario, say, when the offense is consigned to fourth and long, pinned near its own end zone? It’s still
better not to punt? “Yup,” he says, arms folded across his thick belly. Huh?

  According to Kelley’s statistics, when a team punts from that deep, the opponent will take possession inside the 40-yard line and, from such a favorable distance, will score a touchdown 77 percent of the time. Meanwhile, if the fourth-down attempt is unsuccessful and the opponent recovers on downs inside the 10-yard line, it will score a touchdown 92 percent of the time. “So [forsaking] a punt you give your offense a chance to stay on the field. And if you miss, the odds of the other team scoring a touchdown only increase 15 percent.”

  The onside kicks? According to Kelley’s figures, after a conventional kickoff, the receiving team, on average, takes over at its own 33-yard line. After an unsuccessful onside kick, it assumes possession at its own 48. Through the years, Pulaski has recovered between one-quarter and one-third of its onside kicks. “So you’re giving up 15 yards for a one-in-three chance to get the ball back,” says Kelley. “I’ll take that every time!”

  The decision not to return punts? In high school, punts seldom travel more than 30 yards. And at least for a small, private high school where speed demons are in short supply, Pulaski’s return team seldom runs back punts for touchdowns. A far more likely outcome for the return team is a penalty or a fumble. So Kelley—the same man who will go for it on fourth and 20—instructs his team to avoid returning punts altogether. “It’s just not worth the risk,” he explains.

  A folksy, exceedingly likable man in his mid-forties whose wife, kids, and elderly mom come to every Pulaski home game, Kelley makes no pretenses about his academic credentials. “I just like to quantify it all together,” he says. “But I’m not like an astrophysicist or a real math whiz.”

  The real math whizzes, however, confirm much of Kelley’s analysis. David Romer, a prominent Cal–Berkeley economist and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research—whose wife, Christina, chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers for two years—published a 2005 study titled “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Pro Football.” Taking data from the first quarter of NFL games, Romer concluded that in many fourth-down situations, statistically, teams are far better off forgoing a punt or field goal and keeping the offense on the field for another down. His paper is filled with the kind of jargon that would induce narcolepsy among most football fans. He also looked only at first-quarter results because he figured his data would be skewed by obvious fourth-down attempts, for example, when a team is down by seven points late in the game and everyone knows it has to go for it. But, greatly simplified, here are his conclusions:

  Inside the opponent’s 45-yard line, facing anything less than fourth and eight, teams are better off going for it than punting.

  Inside the opponent’s 33-yard line, they are better off going for it on anything less than fourth and 11.*

  Regardless of field position, on anything less than fourth and five, teams are always better off going for it.

  Other mathematicians and game theory experts have reached similar conclusions. Frank Frigo and Chuck Bower—a former backgammon world champion and an Indiana University astrophysicist—created a computer modeling program for football called ZEUS that takes any football situation and furnishes the statistically optimal strategy. The results often suggest going for it when the conventional football wisdom says to punt.

  Kelley believes that the “quant jocks” don’t go far enough to validate the no-punting worldview and, more generally, the virtues of risk-taking. “The math guys, the astrophysicist guys, they just do the raw numbers and they don’t figure emotion into it—and that’s the biggest thing of all,” he says. “The built-in emotion involved in football is unbelievable, and that’s where the benefits really pay off.” What he means is this: A defense that stops an opponent on third down is usually ecstatic. They’ve done their job. The punting unit comes on, and the offense takes over. When that defense instead gives up a fourth-down conversion, it has a hugely deflating effect. At Pulaski’s games, you can see the shoulders of the opposing defensive players slump and their eyes look down when they fail to stop the Bruins on fourth down.

  Conversely, Kelley is convinced that fourth-down success has a galvanizing effect on the offense. “It was do or die and they did,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that on more than half of our touchdown drives, we converted a fourth down.”

  Similarly, according to Kelley’s statistics, when an Arkansas high school team recovers a turnover, it is almost twice as likely to score a touchdown as it is when it receives a punt at the same yard line. He cites this as another argument in support of onside kicking and the refusal to risk fumbling a punt return.

  The benefits of Kelley’s unique system don’t stop there. Because the formations and play-calling are so out of the ordinary, Pulaski tends to induce an inordinate number of penalties from the opposing team. Since Pulaski’s ways are so thoroughly unique, in the week before playing the Bruins, opponents depart from their normal preparation routine. They devote hours to practicing all manner of onside kick returns and defending trick plays and installing dime packages on fourth down. There’s that much less time to spend practicing their own plays.

  Especially in high school, when off-season practice time is limited—and you’re dealing with teenage attention spans—those lost hours can be critical. In the run-up to the Pulaski game, Central Arkansas Christian’s coach, Tommy Shoemaker, estimated that he spent half his practices worrying about the Bruins’ schemes. How much time did his team usually spend on the opposition? “Maybe twenty percent.” Then again, he added wryly, at least his boys didn’t have to spend time worrying about punt returns or field goal blocks. Turning serious, he added: “Keep in mind, we play these guys every year. I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like getting ready if you didn’t have any history.”

  Still another abstract benefit of playing for Pulaski: The experience is so different from traditional high school football that the Bruins’ players feel as though they’re part of something unique, an elite unit amid regular cadets. The team bonds have solidified; the offensive and defensive players consider themselves kindred spirits, bracketed together by their singular coach. And there are so many trick plays and intricate formations that players, by necessity, are alert at all times.

  Happy as Kelley is to unleash his empirical evidence, these are the numbers that matter most to him: In the years since he took over as head coach, Pulaski is 77–17–1 through 2009, winning 82 percent of its games, and has been to the state championship three times, winning twice. All this despite drawing talent from only a small pool of private school adolescents. “I’m telling you,” says Kelley. “It works.”

  It’s up for debate whether Kelley’s operating principles would work in all cases, for all teams, on all levels—for the record, he thinks they would—but his success at Pulaski is beyond dispute. With that record, you’d think other coaches would try to implement some form of Kelley-ball, but although he has become a minor celebrity in coaching circles and speaks at various banquets and conferences, he has not been flattered sincerely by imitation. Other coaches have cribbed the West Coast offense from Bill Walsh, the former Stanford and San Francisco 49ers coach, or the spread formation from Mike Leach, late of Texas Tech, but Kelley draws little more than a curious eye. “If there’s another team out there that don’t ever punt,” he says with a shrug, “I haven’t heard of ’em.”

  Several years ago, a prominent college coach paid a visit to Kelley’s office at Pulaski, a nondescript box off to the side of the basketball court. The coach—Kelley doesn’t want to name him for fear it might hurt the future recruitment of Pulaski players—asked for a primer on “that no punting stuff.” Kelley happily obliged, explaining his philosophy and showing off his charts. “He wrote all sorts of stuff down in this big old binder and I’m thinking, ‘Finally someone else sees the light.’ ” But when Kelley watched the coach’s team play the next season, he saw no evidence that he had a disciple. Even
armed with the knowledge that he was disadvantaging his team by his decision to punt, the coach routinely ordered the ball booted on fourth down.

  That mirrors David Romer’s experience. In his paper, Romer, the Berkeley economist, argued that the play-calling of NFL teams shows “systematic and clear cut” departures from the decisions that would maximize their chances of winning. Based on data from more than 700 NFL games, Romer identified 1,068 fourth-down situations in which, statistically speaking, the right call would have been to go for it. The NFL teams punted 959 times. In other words, nearly 90 percent of the time, NFL coaches made the suboptimal choice.

  Inasmuch as an academic paper can become a cult hit, Romer’s made the rounds in NFL executive offices, but most NFL coaches seemed to dismiss his findings as the handiwork of an egghead, polluting art with science. Plenty admit to being familiar with Romer’s work; few have put his discoveries into practice.

  It all lays bare an abiding irony of football. Here are these modern-day gladiators, big, strong Leviathans. It’s a brutal, unforgiving game filled with testosterone and bravado. Players collide off each other so violently that there might as well be those cartoon bubbles “Pow” and “Bam.” The NFL touts itself as the baddest league of all. Yet when it comes to decision-making, it’s remarkably, well, wimpy.

  There’s not just an aversion to risk and confrontation; coaches often make the wrong choice. In other words, they’re just like … the rest of us.

  Time and again, we let the fear of loss overpower rational decision-making and often make ourselves worse off just to avoid a potential loss. Psychologists call this loss aversion, and it means we often tend to prefer avoiding losses at the expense of acquiring gains. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are credited with discovering this phenomenon. (Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for this work in 2002; Tversky died in 1996 before being recognized.) As the late baseball manager Sparky Anderson put it: “Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good.”