Never Punt with Denard?: Fourth Down Strategy Revisited

Mathlete, really appreciate your analyses.

I've noticed that you consistently use Excel for generating your plots. This is completely unsolicited, and I don't know anything about your background, but you might look into gnuplot, matplotlib, or even R... oftentimes it's a lot easier to generate really pretty graphs with those tools. Even if you're generating your data in Excel it's a lot easier to save it in CSV/raw text and use something else to plot with.

Sorry for the OT-ness. I've converted a decent number of people and figured I'd say something.

This is the only chart i need:

Denard did have a great punt earlier this season, so why not let him kick FG's too?  I mean clearly he can do it all... and that would also make for some reallly sweet Special teams plays.

I think the reason why more coaches don't go for it more often on 4th down is because kicking the punt is considered as the safe option.  I mean listen how the announcers blew up with ND went for it with 4th and 2.  It's interesting though, they sing praises for Dantonio calling for a fake field goal because it worked.  If it hadn't worked they would have said he should have went for the tie.  Personally, I'd rather see a coach go down in flames trying to win rather than one do the safe stuff trying not to lose.

I would love to see us get more aggressive play calling.

If we know that we are going to go for it on 4th down, it makes getting the 1st down much easier.  Instead of 3 plays to get 10 yards, knowing you have a fourth allllows us to better play call on 12t, 2nd, and 3rd down to pick it up.

I would be interested in seeing some error bars on the scatter plot that shows expected points vs. field position for good defenses and bad.  Are the standard deviations small or large? 

Also, I assume that you used season data to determine "good" vs. "bad" defenses and made some sensible deliniation between the two.  (Maybe you put this in your post and I missed it the first time through.)

It's easy to see that the quality of our defense would affect our 4th down decision in the extreme cases. If we had a defense that always allowed a TD, our decision on 4th down would be to always go for it, because getting more than one score down would mean a loss. Having a defense that never allows a score would make our decision always kick, becuase a FG would be as valuable as a TD.

This is a very interesting read.  Brian Kelly took a lot of crap from Todd Blackledge over his decision to go for it on 4th and short in his own territory this past weekend but the data suggests that it's probably the right call.  Even if we don't go for it as often as the chart suggests, I'd like to see us play for 4th down from now on when it's 3rd and 6.  The past couple of weeks we have seen passes thrown into the end zone on this situation right before a missed field goal.

Great analysis and makes tremendous sense.  Several credible statistical analyses have demonstrated that in the NFL teams punt too often.  It is ingrained in coaches and most just punt as a matter of course.  Ironically the fans would almost always enthusiastically support the decision to go on 4th down.

The often unappreciated benefit to planning to go on 4th down is what it does to 3rd down.  Say you have 3rd and 4.  If you going to go on 4th a running play on 3rd now makes more sense, as you have two runs to make the 4 yards.  If you believe in the run, as we do with Denard, this strategy increases the chances of continuing the drive, as we are arguably more likely to make the 4 yards in two running plays as opposed to one pass play

To summarize, an overall strategy to go on 4th down once over midfield really becomes a 3rd down decision.  Once you hit 3rd and medium-to-long it should be viewed as a two play sequence. not two separate decisions.

Yeah, "blankety blank" kicker is about how I feel about it too.

to read that we assume Michigans offense will be in the top 20.  I'm sure this is a concensus, but I love watching this offense.  I've almost gotten to the point where I expect a touchdown on every drive.

As someone who thinks math and detailed analysis ought to be far more important in sports and literally explode every time a coach talks about his "gut" this chart is the best thing since Moneyball and I love every single thing that's ever been done with it.

How far into the game do we have to be before it is a "late game scoring situation" and the score starts to come into play?

The chart doesn't make common sense to me.  Let's assume  a great D gives up 15 pts or less per game and a bad D gives up 30 pts or more.  Wouldn't it make sense that at any given starting point, the great D would give up half as many points as the bad D?  Your chart appears to say that a great D will give up 80-90% of the points a bad D does regardless of starting point (the graphs are so close together all the way up the chart).

This flies in the face of logic to me.  I guess I need to know what constitutes your bad D and good D.

Nice work.

Unfortunately, thanks to the MSM, we're still a long way from seeing a major college or NFL coach actually employ a strategy like this.

Great article, a follow question:

If you adopt this strategy instead of a traditional, 'take the field goal' strategy, due to a poor field goal unit, what is the average impact on your scoring offense per drive?

This seems pretty optimistic to me, given the weak defenses Michigan has played so far.  Is this a critical assumption?  If its an average offense how much does this chart change?

Mathlete, you make math way cooler than I remember it being when I was in school.

This is an excellent piece.  It shows that coaches should go for it on 4th way more than they do. 

The reason that I do not see coaches changing their 4th down decision-making matrix despite this data is that when a coach goes for it on 4th and fails to get the 1st down, the coach will be villified if the decision costs the team the game.  By contrast, if a coach does the safe thing and goes for the FG, if the kicker misses, nobody is going to crucify the coach for the desision because we are all used to it. 

That said, RR has guts (combined with terrible FG kickers), so I could see him going for it more on 4th.

I appreciate the thought and effort that went into this and don't mean to nitpick, but shouldn't the gray triangle in the upper left of the chart also be white, too?  I realize you can't have 4th and X if you're inside the opponent's X yardline, which explains the gray triangle on the upper right.  That's not the case on your own side of the field.  You can have 4th and 10 from your own 5, for example.

Can the database tell you about Opponent's expected points after 3 & Outs? It seems like this would be a factor from the "How Good is My Defense" POV? Could you approach this from Time of Possession, Number of Drives?

Rich Rod should go for it more. Screw the mass media.

Mass media reeks. If you do the logical thing (going for it), but it sometimes fails, the talking heads crucify you. If you do the risk averse, conventional unwisdom thing (kicking), and it consistently fails, the media care little.

But at the end of the year, fans care about total wins and losses. Going for it produces more wins. The in season controversies are largely forgotten. Hardly anyone remembers the coaching decisions made during last year's Indiana game or any other individual game. But they do remember five wins and seven losses.

is that if you have fourth-and-one just about anywhere, you need to have your kicking team go get hot dogs or something. (Of course it sucks if you go for it on your 20 and don't make it ... but in the long run, you'll make up for it by continuing drives that would otherwise have stalled at your 20.)

This is an OUTSTANDING analysis and has COMPLETELY changed the way I view 4 downs.  Like most, I was always thinking that a 4th & 2 or 3 inside your own territory was a punting situation for sure.  NOT ANYMORE!  Let's hope the coaching staff reads this and buys into it (can't think of any reason not to after the last 3 weeks)!  This is great info and thanks for posting it!

As someone who thinks math and detailed analysis ought to be far more important in sports and literally explode every time a coach talks about his "gut" this chart is the best thing since Moneyball and I love every single thing that's ever been done with it.

How far into the game do we have to be before it is a "late game scoring situation" and the score starts to come into play?

I love this idea.  I really think the Coach should go for it on 4th down more often, given that his offense is by leaps and bounds the best part of the team.  However, there's one thing I'm cautious about that you fail to mention:  math is terribly bad at modeling psychology.  

You can bet that when the offense is there, facing 4th down, convert-or-die, a couple of players might secretly ask themselves what happens if they fail to make it.  Doubt creeps in.  On the other side of the ball, the defense will likely be more pumped than ever to stop them, since the rewards are so high: they could instantly get the ball back.  

Of course, it's possible that for some teams, the added pressure might swing the odds the other way.  Even so, that just makes this idea even more unpredictable, I believe, than what you present here.

You say you use 3rd down conversion rates because the data on them is much more plentiful.  But I'm betting it's not as fair of a substitute as it seems.  I would guess that a 4th-and-6 gets converted a lot less often than a 3rd-and-6 does.  I could be wrong though.  I'd be curious to see the data.

Either way, I agree that Michigan should be going for it on 4th down more often than most teams... just probably not as often as you say.

Football Outsiders linked to this post. Preaching to the choir, in a sense, but still, that's good to see.