The Cowboys’ decision to kick a field goal from the New England 11-yard line with 6:04 left in regulation seemed wrong to an awful lot of fans watching the game. It was only the second time Dallas had been that close to the end zone all day. They were down by seven; punching it in would have given the team the chance to tie with a point-after kick.
They had just tried, with a Dak Prescott pass to tight end Blake Jarwin in the back of the end zone. Prescott seemingly had room to run before firing the ball on that third down; even if he had not scored or picked up the first down, he likely would have, at the very least, lessened the fourth-down distance. Despite needing seven yards to move the chains, it was arguably a go-for-it moment.
Jason Garrett disagreed, math and analytics and the way some successful NFL teams are now employing hard and fast statistics to make real-time game decisions be damned.
The coach explained his thought process to 105.3 The Fan on Monday morning:
“Just over six minutes to go in the ball game. We obviously hadn’t done real well on third downs throughout the game, so 4th-and-7 was going to be a challenging situation, particularly down there where you don’t have as much space. So we just felt like, in that situation, with that much time left in the ball game, just go ahead and make it a 4-point game. Let’s see if we can play defense, give our offense an opportunity to come back and win it. The other factor in a situation like that if they do move the ball and they kick a field goal, and you’ve gone for the touchdown and you haven’t made it, now it’s a 10-point game and a two-score game. So this keeps you in a more manageable situation if they do kick a field goal, it still would only be a 7-point game. Biggest thing you try to do there is make sure you give yourself an opportunity to come back the other way. Just under three minutes to go, three timeouts and a two-minute warning, we felt like that gave us a pretty decent chance coming back to win the ball game.”
In Garrett’s answer, some variation of the word feel shows up a lot. Lots of if. Ambiguous, open-ended phrases like let’s see. His usual emphasis on opportunity.
But there’s a big difference between opportunity and probability. And that’s where hosts Shan and RJ went with their follow-up question:
“Coach, there’s a stat called win probability. Basically, it tells you before each play, your chances of winning the game- whether they increase or decrease- based on the play you’re going to run. Do you have that information available to you during the game based on each play? Like, ‘Hey, if we kick the field goal here, our chance of winning the game goes up or down?'”
Garrett paused for a moment before replying, simply, “Yeah, we don’t use those stats within the game.”
One of the best teams in the league, however, does. As mentioned for the radio audience after Garrett’s phone interview, the Baltimore Ravens are taking some of the guesswork out of their playcalling. Sitting up in the coaching booth during every game, right next to offensive coordinator Greg Roman, is a 25-year-old behavioral economics major from Yale who runs the numbers when there’s a decision to be made on the sideline.
Sheil Kapadia of The Athletic has a fascinating profile on Daniel Stern, whose official title with the team is that of football analyst. Now in his fourth season with the Ravens, Stern assists the coaching staff during the week as they create an overall strategy for each opponent. And on gameday, Stern is on the headset, directly talking coach John Harbaugh through things like whether the math says to go for it or not in a key 4th-down situation.
It’s still ultimately up to Harbaugh and his gut, but the analytics give the coach the most data possible to help make the decision. Perhaps not coincidentally, Baltimore (through Week 11) had converted 10 of 14 fourth-down plays attempted in 2019, tied for most in the league. “And on the 10 drives where they’ve converted,” Kapadia writes, “eight have resulted in touchdowns. They’re averaging 10.5 yards per play on fourth down, which is tops in the NFL.”
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The Ravens lead the NFL in 4th-down aggressiveness, with a “go rate” over 60 percent (in situations where the win probability is 1-in-5 or better). The Cowboys are between 20 and 25 percent, ranking among the bottom ten teams leaguewide in the above graph, which charts through Week 11.
Sure, it helps the Ravens that they have a weapon like quarterback Lamar Jackson. That obviously lets them be more aggressive in trying to keep opposing defenses on their heels on a do-or-die fourth down play. But Harbaugh has openly embraced concepts like win probability and expected points added and wants to be fed that information during the game.
“We talk about all the different scenarios, and [Stern] basically gives me a percentage,” Harbaugh is quoted in the Athletic piece. “So what’s the added win percentage of going for it? He’ll give it to me like one, two, three, four, five, six, up to whatever. Then you just decide if you want to do it. It’s not strictly based [on the numbers]. I listen to it. If he starts telling me 3 and 4 percent, I get really interested. If it’s 1 or 2 percent, I’m still interested — especially if it’s short, if I think we can get it.”
According to ESPN Stats & Info via Todd Archer, the win probability of the Cowboys going for it on that fourth down with 6:04 to play eleven yards from the goal line? 18.8 percent. “By kicking the field goal,” Archer notes, “the win probability fell to 16.7 percent.”
All of Garrett’s rhetoric about how it felt like cutting the lead kept things more manageable? How the field goal gave the offense a “pretty decent chance” to come back and score again? That decision actually decreased the team’s chances of sneaking a win out of Gillette Stadium. The numbers say so.
Garrett’s dismissal on The Fan?
“Yeah, we don’t use those stats within the game.”
Harbaugh says, “We’re chasing everything that’s gonna give us an edge.”
That sort of philosophy sounds like it would be a breath of fresh air to Cowboys fans, many of whom have tired of Garrett’s old-school insistence on doing things the way he’s always done them just because that’s the way it’s always been done. The 53-year-old Princeton grad may have a lot of football knowledge, but adding a little bit of math to the curriculum sure feels like it might present quite an opportunity.
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