It's been a minute since I've been able to sit down and write something as it has hard to find motivation to write about football, especially since all of my football energy has been devoted for the last three months to coaching my own team.
From a fan's perspective, I tend to bristle when I hear coaches talk about "trusting their instincts" because that seems like 1) an incredibly arbitrary way to make decisions, and 2) a way to deflect blame even more than deferring to "analytics". It feels like coaches are saying "I'm the expert here and I make decisions based off a unique intuition that is only known to me. And since there's no way to objectively evaluate that intuition, my decisions can't be criticized".
You're right that there are certainly nuances (strength of opponent, one's own team's particular strengths and weaknesses) that most statistical models don't capture. However, I'd argue that people are actually quite poor at evaluating risk to begin with, and are really bad at weighing the kinds of tradeoffs at play when considering what to do on 4th down. I can understand deviating from the model if you're really only considering one obvious data point (opting to kick a longer FG if you have a good kicker, for instance). But if a coach is trying to weigh multiple competing data points that are fuzzy in nature ("my team seems tired, but we have 'momentum', but the other team's run D is good on short yardage, but their offense hasn't moved the ball this half"), he's probably better off just trusting a model that is based off thousands of actual historical outcomes.
This is a great comment John, and I could write a novel answering it. Instead Ill hit some key points and then dedicate my next video to going into more detail.
Field position is very important. To me it's the only data point I'll even consider, but I go beyond the standard "go or not go" model and focus more on field position lost/gained. Will the field position gained help me in the long run or can my team survive the bad field position?
If a coach presents himself as the expert and the only one who can execute his game plan and if it fails it's not his fault...he's a bad coach. Developing instincts and knowledge is like taking that spreadsheet to a whole new level because it takes in all avaliable factors. This takes time, effort, and hardworking to accomplish.
My thought is if you are a bad evaluator of risk you shouldn't be a play caller because that's the name of the game. You have about 15 seconds to make a decision if the clock is running, but if you prepared and understand your players and your opponent you can make the call the you feel is right in the moment. Same thing when it comes down to 4th down decisions.
Maybe I misinterpreted the post, but are you suggesting analytical models on 4th down decision making don't take field position into account? It's a pretty major input for the most popular ones I'm familiar with (example: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/39379626/nfl-analytics-models-fourth-graphics-method-decisions-punt-field-goal-go-it), since they're all based on maximizing a team's win probability. But again, maybe I misunderstood the post.
From a fan's perspective, I tend to bristle when I hear coaches talk about "trusting their instincts" because that seems like 1) an incredibly arbitrary way to make decisions, and 2) a way to deflect blame even more than deferring to "analytics". It feels like coaches are saying "I'm the expert here and I make decisions based off a unique intuition that is only known to me. And since there's no way to objectively evaluate that intuition, my decisions can't be criticized".
You're right that there are certainly nuances (strength of opponent, one's own team's particular strengths and weaknesses) that most statistical models don't capture. However, I'd argue that people are actually quite poor at evaluating risk to begin with, and are really bad at weighing the kinds of tradeoffs at play when considering what to do on 4th down. I can understand deviating from the model if you're really only considering one obvious data point (opting to kick a longer FG if you have a good kicker, for instance). But if a coach is trying to weigh multiple competing data points that are fuzzy in nature ("my team seems tired, but we have 'momentum', but the other team's run D is good on short yardage, but their offense hasn't moved the ball this half"), he's probably better off just trusting a model that is based off thousands of actual historical outcomes.
This is a great comment John, and I could write a novel answering it. Instead Ill hit some key points and then dedicate my next video to going into more detail.
Field position is very important. To me it's the only data point I'll even consider, but I go beyond the standard "go or not go" model and focus more on field position lost/gained. Will the field position gained help me in the long run or can my team survive the bad field position?
If a coach presents himself as the expert and the only one who can execute his game plan and if it fails it's not his fault...he's a bad coach. Developing instincts and knowledge is like taking that spreadsheet to a whole new level because it takes in all avaliable factors. This takes time, effort, and hardworking to accomplish.
My thought is if you are a bad evaluator of risk you shouldn't be a play caller because that's the name of the game. You have about 15 seconds to make a decision if the clock is running, but if you prepared and understand your players and your opponent you can make the call the you feel is right in the moment. Same thing when it comes down to 4th down decisions.