As you're watching the Raiders and Cowboys (or, for late eaters, the Giants and Broncos) butt heads this Thursday, ponder this: NFL teams don't go for it enough. That can teach us a lot about more consequential fields, including foreign policy. The attachment to punting, at the expense of winning, shows how conventional wisdom discourages leaders from doing what is best for their teams, firms, and country.
Consider the controversy that's still raging in Boston: the New England Patriots' decision to go for the win on fourth down against the Indianapolis Colts on Nov. 15. The Patriots led the Colts by six with about two minutes left. It was fourth and 2. Going for it and failing meant giving the ball back to star quarterback Peyton Manning, in his home stadium, 28 yards from the endzone. Punt and the Colts would have to drive some 60 yards to get the touchdown. Punting, we all know, is the safe thing to do there. Coach Bill Belichick went for it.
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Tom Brady's pass to Kevin Faulk was ruled short of the first-down marker, and the Colts then scored and won. Fans and commentators denounced Belichick's gamble. Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy called it an unrivaled gaffe. Former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison said it was the worst decision he had seen Belichick make. The old Colts coach, Tony Dungy, said you go with the percentages and punt.
But the percentages don't say that. Belichick didn't gamble, according to analysts who use NFL history to judge how coaching decisions impact the probability of winning. AdvancedNFLStats.com, for example, found that going for it in that situation gives a team a 79 percent chance of winning. (The quick breakdown: Teams pick up fourth and twos 60 percent of the time. Convert, and you can run out the clock and win. If you don't make it, the opponent gets a touchdown just over half the time.) Punting, by contrast, gives a team only a 70 percent chance of winning. And those are averages -- with the Colts' elite offense playing against a worn-out Pats' defense, the case for punting is worse.
Among football-stats hobbyists, that conclusion is uncontroversial. They are puzzled why teams punt so often. An economist, David Romer, even analyzed past NFL fourth downs and found that teams have systematically given away points by kicking. He reasoned that if the NFL's competitive pressures don't cause teams to maximize scoring, markets might not cause firms to maximize profit.
Social convention explains this deviation from what seems rational. Five Super Bowl rings give Belichick the job security to play the odds and let critics howl. Less-secure coaches have a different calculus. Critics can ruin their career. To protect their reputation, they might punt even knowing that it lowers the odds of winning. Punting reinforces the convention -- if Tony Dungy does it, it must make sense -- making it tougher for new Belichicks to emerge.
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