On the Patriots’ next possession, they moved the ball with deliberate slowness and faced fourth and two on their own 28-yard line. It was a compelling test case for risk management in the NFL. If the Patriots punted, it was a virtual certainty that Indianapolis would get the ball back, leaving Peyton Manning slightly more than two minutes and two time-outs (one of their own and one from the two-minute warning) to move the ball 65 or 70 yards to score a touchdown—a feat he had achieved on many occasions, including the last time the two teams had met in Indianapolis.
If the Patriots went for it and converted, the game’s outcome would effectively be sealed. However, if the Patriots went for it and failed, they would give the Colts the ball inside their 30-yard line. So going for it would either end the game or—worst-case scenario—give the ball back to Manning and the Colts’ offense 35 to 40 yards closer than punting the ball would. If the Colts scored a touchdown quickly from that shorter distance, there might still be time for the Patriots to kick a game-winning field goal. There were other factors as well. The Patriots’ defense was visibly exhausted, and, thanks to injuries, two starters were missing from New England’s defensive secondary, another factor militating against punting. Watching the game at home in Arkansas, Kevin Kelley shouted at his television, hoping Belichick would have the “guts” (his word) to forsake punting.
Beyond gut intuition, the analytics also supported going for it. Crunching the numbers, the average NFL team converts on fourth and two about 60 percent of the time. If successful, the Patriots would almost assuredly win the game. If they failed and the Colts took over on the Pats’ 30-yard line with two minutes left and down by six points, the Patriots were still 67 percent likely to win the game. In other words, the Colts had only a one in three chance of actually scoring a touchdown from the Patriots’ 30, so it was hardly as if the Patriots were conceding a touchdown if the fourth-down attempt failed. Alternatively, punting the ball would put the Colts at roughly their own 30, which gave the Patriots about a 79 percent chance of winning. There was, then, only a 12 percent difference in the probability of winning the game if the Patriots failed on fourth down versus if they punted the ball. And if they converted (which was 60 percent likely), the game would effectively be over. Adding everything up, going for it gave the Patriots an 81 percent chance to win the game versus a 72 percent chance if they punted.* Even tweaking these numbers by using different assumptions, you’d be hard-pressed to favor punting. At best, you could say it was a close call between punting and going for it; at worst, going for it dominated.
NFL fans probably will recall what happened next. Belichick ordered his offense to stay on the field. “We thought we could win the game on that play,” he said afterward. New England’s quarterback, Tom Brady, had thrown for nearly 400 yards that evening but couldn’t pick up the crucial 72 inches on fourth down. He zipped a quick pass to Kevin Faulk. Like a man smushing out a cigarette in an ashtray, Colts safety Melvin Bullitt ground Faulk into the turf a few feet shy of the line.
By then, the fates had already written the script. As condemnation of Belichick’s “cowboy tactic” and “needless gamble” was beginning to crackle in the broadcast booth and on the blogosphere, the Colts marched methodically, inevitably, to the end zone. With seconds to play, Indianapolis scored a touchdown on a one-yard pass to win the game 35–34.
Belichick may have been the most highly regarded coach in the NFL and may have made what was, statistically anyway, the correct call, but out came the knives. The reviews from the salon were brutal:
“You have to punt the ball in that situation. As much as you may respect Peyton Manning and his ability, as much as you may doubt your defense, you have to play the percentages and punt the ball.… You have got to play the percentages and punt the ball.” –NBC analyst Tony Dungy, the Colts’ former coach
“It was a really bad coaching decision by Coach Belichick. I have all the respect in the world for him, but he has to punt the ball. The message you send in the locker room is, ‘I have no confidence in my young guys on defense.’ ” –former Patriots safety and current NBC analyst Rodney Harrison
“Ghastly.… Too smart for his own good this time. The sin of hubris.”–Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy
“Is there an insanity defense for football coaches?”–Boston Herald columnist Ron Borges
“I hated the call. It smacked of ‘I’m-smarter-than-they-are’ hubris. This felt too cheap.”–Peter King, SI.com
“My vocabulary is not big enough to describe the insanity of this decision.”–former NFL quarterback and ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer
“Fourth-and-jackass. That’s our name for a now-infamous play in New England Patriots’ history.”–Pete Prisco, CBSSports.com
“So what was more satisfying Sunday night, watching good guy Peyton Manning rally the Colts or bad guy Bill Belichick choke as a tactician?”–Jeff Gordon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Of course none of these criticisms mentioned that punting was statistically inferior or at best a close call relative to going for it. In fact, they claimed the opposite, that punting was the superior strategy. It wasn’t.
It wasn’t just that the Patriots had lost. It was that Belichick had dared to depart from the status quo. He was the geek with the pocket protector, and damn if it didn’t feel good when he was too smart for his own good. It had all the ring of the cool kids in school celebrating when the know-it-all flunked the test.
Unless blessed with clairvoyance, you make a decision before you know the outcome. The decision to go for it was the right decision. That it didn’t work out doesn’t change the soundness of the decision. Yet people seldom see it this way. They have what psychologists call hindsight bias. If you did the right thing but failed because of bad luck, you’re stupid. If you did the wrong thing but succeeded because of good fortune, you’re a genius. Of course, it’s often the opposite. If your buddy is playing blackjack at the card table and takes a hit (an extra card) when he has 19 and the dealer is showing 4, you should call him a moron. The statistics tell you to stick (decline a card) because the most probable event is that the dealer will bust (get more than 21) or have less than 19. If your buddy takes a card anyway and gets a 2, giving him 21, and wins, should he be hailed as a genius? No, he’s still a moron—just a lucky moron. The same holds for any decision we make in the face of uncertainty. Luck doesn’t make us smarter or dumber, only lucky or unlucky.
The very next week the Patriots hosted their division rivals, the New York Jets, who had beaten the Pats a few weeks earlier. On their second drive, New England faced fourth down and one on the Jets’ 38-yard line. Despite the beating he’d taken in the media, among fans, and even from former Patriots players, Belichick again went for it, which is exactly what the numbers tell you to do. In the broadcast booth, the announcers were leery, already questioning the coach’s tactics, “especially after what happened the previous week!” they intoned. This time, however, Laurence Maroney, the Pats’ bruising running back, busted over the left tackle for two yards. First down. The announcers said little. Belichick was not praised for this strategic success commensurately with how he’d been blasted the previous week.
Again, this is Bill Belichick. If the most secure coach in the league, whose cerebral analysis is thought to be unmatched, could be subjected to such a severe beating over a well-calculated risk, imagine how a rookie coach or a coach on the hot seat is going to be treated.
And it’s not just football coaches who face a difficult time departing from convention. In 1993, Tony La Russa was managing the Oakland A’s and was dismayed as his team was last in the division. Pitching was particularly problematic. Oakland’s earned run average (ERA) had swollen to more than 5.00. After a particularly brutal weekend series during which the A’s gave up 32 runs, La Russa and his longtime pitching coach, Dave Duncan, asked themselves, “Who made the rule that teams need four starters who throw 100 or so pitches, followed by a middle reliever and a closer?”
La
Russa seized on an idea: Why not take his nine pitchers and establish three-man pitching “units” in which each pitcher would throw only 50 tosses, usually within three innings? The thinking was simple: The pitchers would take the mound every three games but would be fresher since they’d throw fewer pitches per outing. Also, the opposing batters would be unable to establish much comfort, since they might well face a different pitcher every time they came to the plate. It turns out that baseball statistics back this up. Major League batters hit about 27 points lower the first time they face a pitcher in a game. Their on-base percentage is about 27 points lower and their slugging percentage is 58 points lower the first time they face a pitcher. This could be because the pitcher’s arm is fresher or because the hitter needs to see him more than once to figure him out. Either way, La Russa’s idea would capitalize on this effect.
There were other potential advantages, too. By having essentially all your pitchers available to you each game, you have more options to choose from in any situation. In addition, the most expensive pitchers tend to be starters who go deep into the game, pitching seven or more innings and throwing 120-plus pitches per game. Turns out the key difference between star pitchers and other pitchers is the stars’ ability to pitch effectively for longer. In the first couple of innings, the differences between star and nonstar pitchers are much smaller. In La Russa’s experiment, for the first three innings he might get comparably effective results from journeyman pitchers who came at a fraction of the cost of the star pitchers, thus leaving extra money to spend on other players—or, in the case of the Oakland A’s, allowing them to remain competitive despite a much smaller budget than some of the big-market teams, such as the New York Yankees.
It was a radical strategy, but La Russa had the status and standing to try to pull it off. He’d been the Oakland manager since 1986 and had taken the team to the World Series in 1988, 1989, and 1990. In 1992, the previous season, he had been named manager of the year. With his accumulated goodwill (and his team in last place), he wasn’t risking much by departing from conventional wisdom.
Unfortunately for La Russa, his chemistry experiment fizzled. Why? The starting pitchers hated it. Publicly they claimed they had a hard time finding a rhythm and settling into a groove. Privately they complained that the 50-pitch limit precluded them from working the requisite five innings to get a win, yet they were still eligible for a loss. (Because future contracts were tied to wins and losses, their manager was potentially costing them real money.) After five games, four of them losses, and a lot of grumbling from the pitchers, La Russa cut bait and returned to the traditional four-man, deeper-pitch-count rotation. It was a reminder: You may have a better strategy, but if the athletes don’t buy in, it’s probably not worth deploying.
Here is a cautionary tale of what happens to a risk-taking coach on shaky employment footing. Paul Westhead, coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, was fired 11 games into the 1981–1982 season, in part because the team’s point guard, Magic Johnson, thought the coach was, of all things, too rigid and restrictive. “This team is not as exciting as it should be,” the Lakers’ owner, Dr. Jerry Buss, said at Westhead’s firing. By the end of the eighties, Westhead, a Shakespeare scholar who looked the part of a professor, was coaching at the college level, at Loyola Marymount. There he deployed a strategy based on many of the same principles that Kevin Kelley uses in Arkansas: The more offensive opportunities and attempts, the better. The statistics support attempting lots of “big plays”—three-pointers in basketball. The unconventional approach upsets the opponents’ preparation routines and displaces them from their comfort zone.
In the 1989–1990 season, tiny Loyola Marymount was the toast of college basketball, the up-tempo team averaging a whopping 122 points a game, running other teams to exhaustion, and coming within a game of reaching the Final Four. (That the team’s star player, Hank Gathers, died during the season added a sad layer of drama and exposure.)
Intrigued by Westhead’s unique philosophy, his willingness to take ordinary “running and gunning” to a new level, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets poached him from the college game to be head coach for the 1990–1991 season. He stated that his methods would be even more effective a mile above sea level, as opponents would tire even more quickly. Westhead encouraged his players to play at a breakneck pace, shoot once every seven seconds—twice the league average—and take plenty of three-pointers. He reckoned that not only would shooting 35 percent on three-pointers yield more points than shooting 50 percent on two-pointers, but longer shots would lead to more offensive rebounds: When the Nuggets missed, they stood a better chance of retaining possession. On defense, the team played at the same methamphetaminic speed, using constant backcourt pressure and trapping. “The idea is to play ultrafast on offense and ultrafast on defense, so it becomes a double hit,” Westhead explained to Sports Illustrated. “And when it works, it’s not like one and one is two. It’s like one and one is seven.”
Except that it wasn’t. At the pro level, Westhead’s experiment failed spectacularly. Opposing players took advantage of the Nuggets’ chaos and the irregular spacing. The Nuggets’ strategy of shooting early and often led to easy baskets on the other end. As it turned out, it was the Denver players who were often huffing and puffing—and on injured reserve—from the relentless running. (One Denver player complained that his arm hurt from throwing so many outlet passes.) Games came to resemble the Harlem Globetrotters clowning on the Washington Generals. In one game, the Phoenix Suns scored 107 points, most on dunks and layups, in the first half, which still stands as an NBA record. The Nuggets started the season 1–14 and finished a league-worst 20–62. They scored 120 points a game but surrendered more than 130 and were mocked as the Enver Nuggets, a nod to their absence of “D.” Westhead grudgingly slowed down the pace the next season but was fired nevertheless.
You might say it was a valiant effort by Westhead. Hey, at least he tried something different. And if his nonconformist ways failed in Denver, they sure worked at Loyola Marymount. Maybe it was just a question of personnel and circumstance. Barely a decade later, the Phoenix Suns, blessed with better players than Westhead’s Nuggets, were borrowing many of his ideas and principles, racking up wins with a celebrated breakneck, shoot-first-ask-questions-later offense nicknamed “seven seconds or less.”
But Westhead was hardly cast as an innovator. He was considered an “eccentric,” one of the more damning labels in sports. Mavericks are seldom tolerated in the coaching ranks. A mad professor without tenure, Westhead—unlike so many who fail conventionally—never got another NBA head coaching opportunity. His next job was with a modest college program at George Mason University. From there, he caromed to the Japanese League and the WNBA, where he coached the Phoenix Mercury to a title. He returned briefly to the NBA as an assistant, but that was short-lived. At this writing, Westhead is the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Oregon, coaching a mediocre team that scores prolifically.
Pulaski’s Kevin Kelley is an innovative thinker, but he is also exquisitely well placed to install his unconventional strategies. In addition to coaching the football team, Kelley doubles as the athletic director for Pulaski Academy. He is his own immediate supervisor. He draws his players from a small pool of affluent kids whose parents can afford parochial school tuition and probably place football a distant third behind academics and violin lessons. When Kelley’s choices fail, there aren’t many boos from the stands or angry fans calling the local sports talk show or starting websites dedicated to his firing. Since he coaches high school kids, he doesn’t face the threat of player (and agent) revolt the way Tony La Russa did with the Oakland A’s pitching staff.
That Thursday night game at Pulaski spanned nearly three hours, mostly because of incomplete passes and penalties that stopped the game clock. But it showcased how Kelley’s savvy and well-considered, if unconventional, approach led a decidedly smaller, slower, and younger Pulaski team to victory, 33–20. Afterward, in the p
ostgame breakdown, Kelley said flatly, “The system won that game.” As the players shook hands near midfield, one of the Mustangs sought out the Bruins’ quarterback, Wil Nicks, and told him, “I wish we played like y’all.”
Pulaski went all the way to the Class 5A state championship game in 2008. In that tournament run, Kelley stayed true to his philosophy. In the semifinal game against Greenwood—the school that had knocked them out of the tournament two years in a row, including a 56–55 heartbreaker in the state championship in 2006—Pulaski started the game with an onside kick, recovered it, and drove all the way down to Greenwood’s six-yard line before turning the ball over after failing to convert on fourth down. That might have discouraged most coaches, especially against a team they’ve had trouble beating. Not Kelley. He continued to go for it on every fourth down, eventually winning the game 54–24 and amassing 747 yards of total offense in the process.
In the championship game against West Helena Central—a team with eight future Division I players to Pulaski’s one—Kelley again refused to punt or kick. In the waning minutes, the Bruins had possession and clung to a slim 35–32 lead. Faced with three fourth downs early in the drive, they went for it each time and made it. With less than 1:30 left on the clock, they faced yet another fourth down at midfield. The conventional strategy was to punt the ball, pin your opponent deep in their own end, and force them to drive 60 to 70 yards in less than a minute and a half to get into field goal range. If you go for it and fail, you leave Helena just 20 yards away from field goal range and give them a chance to tie the game. What do the statistics tell you to do? Go for it. That is what Kelley did. The Pulaski quarterback plunged over the right side for a couple of yards, converting yet another fourth down on what would be the final drive of the game as Pulaski ran out the clock and captured its second state championship. Asked if he ever thought about punting on that final drive with so much at stake, Kelley responded without hesitation: “Never.”
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won Page 6