One of the major criticisms of Josh McDaniels over his 25 games as Raiders head coach was his lack of aggressiveness. Head coaches have to make gutsy decisions, and one of the most important is when they decide to go for it on fourth down.
The folks over at FTN Fantasy put together what they call an aggressiveness index. It counts how often coaches go for it on fourth down while filtering out those times when they likely have to go for it (for instance late in a game when only a touchdown or more will do) and the times when they absolutely should not. This essentially leaves behind the number of times they opt to go for it on fourth down when given a choice between a short punt or a field goal try.
For the Raiders, they counted 106 total fourth-down opportunities. Of those, they were expected to go for it on at least 15 of them, and they went for it 10 times. This gave them an aggressiveness index of 0.65, which is the lowest in the NFL.
You may be surprised to learn that the 0.65 number accounts for both Josh McDaniels and Antonio Pierce. McDaniels went for it four times, when 6.1 was the expected number; Pierce went for it six times, while 9.2 was expected.
For comparison, and a way of understanding what the 0.65 aggressiveness index really means, one of the most aggressive coaches was the Lions’ Dan Campbell. He went for it on fourth down a league-high 29 times. His 1.67 score suggests that he went for it two-thirds of the time more than he was expected, rather than one-third less as was the case with both Raiders coaches.
This points to potentially three things for the Raiders. One is the offense staying the same even when McDaniels and OC Mick Lombardi were fired. The next is lack of confidence in the offense. The other is faith that the defense will carry the team — something it did for most of the team’s wins this season.
As for the offensive scheme that carried over from McDaniels, it may just be part of “the Patriot Way” considering the next-lowest aggressiveness index score in the league was for McDaniels’ old boss Bill Belichick in New England (0.73).
McDaniels showed no confidence in any of the three starting quarterbacks he had in his eight games this season, whether it was Jimmy Garoppolo, Brian Hoyer or Aidan O’Connell. And you can’t really blame him too much for that, but confidence or not, sometimes you just have to realize pussyfooting around isn’t going to get the offense where it needs to be.
Pierce went full time to the rookie O’Connell and put most of his faith in the play of the defense to keep the Raiders in games rather than risk the offense screwing that up.
There is no perfect correlation here between winning and aggressiveness. There are playoff teams on each end of this spectrum. The Lions (1.67), Eagles (1.66) and Browns (1.44) are near the top, and the Ravens (0.76), Steelers (0.76) and Rams (0.79) are near the bottom. Each must be judged for its own reasons.
The only thing that seems to tie together the good teams from the bad is the number of opportunities to go for it. The teams with the worst offenses just aren’t in the position to make that decision very often.
What you would hope for the Raiders is they get themselves a quarterback who can not only improve the team’s ability to get those opportunities, but who the head coach can feel confident enough in to go for the kill shot.