Conservative decisions of football coaches: fourth-down conversion and default decisions

Tyler Cowen links to a paper by David Romer on football coaches’ fourth-down decisions (punt, go for a field goal, or go for a first down or touchdown). Apparently a coach would increase the probability of winning the game by going for the first down or toouchdown much more often, and punting and going for the field goal much less often.

I’ve heard this beforem–that “going for it” is the “percentage play”–and Romer asks in this paper why should it be. After all, the economic incentives clearly favor the idea of winning games. It seems like a huge Moneyball-style opprotunity, the pro-sports equivalent of the famous $20 on the street in that joke about the 2 economists. And, for that matter, “going for it” on 4th down is a more exciting play, so it should make the fans happy (as compared to Moneyball-like strategies such as being patient at the plate and drawing walks, which arguably are so boring as to potentially lose fans).

Conservatism everwhere

As Romer points out, the conservative strategy of football coaches is a general case of conseratism in decision making that appears in many contexts in the Kahneman-Slovic-Tversky literature. I like the term “conservatism” here and think it preferable to “risk aversion,” a term that is so vague as to have no meaning anymore, I think.

At least from anecdotal evidence (e.g., stories about Woody Hayes), my impression is that football coaches are conservative in other ways too, and maybe these attitudes go toghether. In any case, my impression from reading Bill James and Moneyball is that sports decisions are often made more on flashy numbers than on more relevant data analysis. (I’m sure that this is true of the rest of us too in making our decisions–the sports coaches are just in the embarrassing position of having more hard data available.)

A rational reason for conservatism in this case

In the particular example of fourth-down conversion, somebody–I think it was Bill James–pointed out a possibly rational reason for coaches to be conservative. The argument goes as follows: if a strategy succeeds and the game is won, everyone’s happy. The real issue comes when it fails. If the coach did the standard strategy and fails, then hey, it’s too bad, but everyone (well, everyone but George Steinbrenner) knows you can’t win ’em all. But if the coach does something that is perceived to be “radical” and it fails, then he looks bad and is much more easily Monday-morning-quarterbacked. Even if the probability of winning is higher under the radical strategy, the medium-term expected payoff (i.e., probability that the coach keeps his job at the end of the season) could be higher under the conservative strategy.

How does this differ from Romer’s theory? Romer suggests a risk-aversion based on probability of winning. In my theory, the “default strategy” plays a key role. There is path dependence and an economic moitivation to follow the default strategy. (This is in addition to the much-observed psychological pheoomenon that people do the default, even at significant personal financial costs.) Romer doesn’t mention the idea of defaults in his paper but I think that’s the next step in studying the phenomenon of conservatism in decision making.

I’m curious what Hal Stern thinks of all of this.

4 thoughts on “Conservative decisions of football coaches: fourth-down conversion and default decisions

  1. We can understand this behavior without psychology by viewing the situation as an example of a principal-agent dilemma. The coach wants to maximize his own welfare, which usually but not always aligns with that of the owner. That monday-morning quarterbacking may be so painful to the coach as to cause him to do the optimal thing for him, which is suboptimal from the point of the owner.

    Then again, is it really the objective of owners to win all games? Sometimes, you might want them lost (draft picks, better playoff matchups). More generally, you might get more fan excitement==more $ if you lose a few more but are in it all the way to the nail-biting end.

  2. Owners want to maximize revenues, which requires a paying fan base that is not easily angered. Such fan base will also project its conventional wisdoms on play calling.

    Coaches have a much longer potential utilization than players, four decades instead of four years. While career wins are a major factor, so is the perception of how smart the coach is, i.e. how much did he contribute to wins. A few controversial calls will diminish his ability to find and maintain high paying employment.

    Bill James, at least for baseball, has come up with a concept of win-shares for players. I suspect he is working on win-shares for coaches with all his other projects.

  3. All this is true, and yet coaches seem prone to making ridiculous decisions regarding when to use the 2-point conversion. One might call these decisions aggressive, or the exact opposite of conservative. For example, it is my opinion that John Fox blew the 2004 SuperBowl by going for the 2-point conversion.

    And why did he do this? Because someone, somewhere in the mists of time, came up with a sheet saying when you use the 2-point conversion. And with almost no mathematical analysis to back up the value of this sheet, coaches grabbed onto it and have been using it, to their detriment, ever since. This is an aggressive use of a decision mechanism. The Romer paper would benefit from a layman's language re-write, but even so Bill Belichik has seen it and said he agrees with some of the points made, although I'm not aware if he has changed his coaching strategy because of it.

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