You’re basically comparing two probabilities: One, the chance of succeeding on the two-point play, and second, the chance of winning in overtime. Both numbers have some precedent but also can get clouded by who you’re playing at that moment, how well you’re playing, etc. If Wichita State miraculously gets into that same position against Florida, I’d probably tell them to go for two because, under the NCAA’s unique overtime format, each team has a roughly 50/50 shot at winning before taking into account talent differential, at which time Florida would dominate. We know that two-point tries are successful something between 40-50% of the time, and that is probably greater than the chance of going toe-to-toe with Florida — hence take your 45% chance of winning right there. For Florida, it is the opposite: you want the game to go on so your natural advantage can take over; so kick the PAT and let’s do this. It’s all an offshoot of David and Goliath strategies.

How does that play out in Michigan’s game? Well if Rodriguez thinks he has the better team — including momentum — then it seems to me you play for overtime. That’s because even if you’re better your chance of getting the two-point try caps out at about 50%, whereas the starting point for your chance of winning in OT is 50%, plus whatever natural advantage you have. Had they been playing Southern Cal, the decision is probably the opposite.

The other thing you notice from this is that slight differences in the probabilities can vastly change the right outcome. We know the estimates for overtime and two-point tries, but this was late in the game and therefore those probabilities were dependent to an extent on what had happened earlier. Not necessarily when or how Michigan scored, but fatigue, injuries, and how good the teams were coming in does matter to help revise probabilities going forward. (Again, I’m trying to distinguish revised estimates of forward-looking probabilities with backward-looking events that should have no effect on the decision to go for it or not.) Thus I think Rodriguez’s judgment call (in just this situation at least) was sound at least in the sense that there is no compelling argument that it was flat wrong. If he thought he had the better team — and the records of the teams going into it seemed to indicate that — then overtime seems the wiser move. The bottom line is two-point tries are not high-percentage plays.

(Here’s a thought experiment someone once asked me. This question assumes we know the probabilities with certainty, which if course unrealistic but here goes: You have the ball on the 23 yard line and are down three. Your team and the other team are completely evenly matched. There’s only one second on the clock; time for only one play. Your field goal kicker is mediocre, and is 50/50 from that distance (40 yards) — i.e. 50% of tying the game by kicking it. Or you could go for it and run a pass play, which you estimate had a 33% chance of succeeding. What do you do and why?)

- Big 10 Q&A. I did a Q&A over at The Rivalry, Esq. with the excellent Graham Filler. Topics including Juice Williams, Northwestern, etc. Tomorrow is a post involving me hemorrhaging about Purdue’s ineptitude.

- Mizzou’s run game. The very sharp Dave Matter of the Columbia Daily Tribune takes a look at Gary Pinkel’s Missouri’s running game.

- An easier case. If the Rodriguez situation above is a push, Raheem Morris is not so lucky. Brian Burke shoots up the new Tampa coach’s thought-process:

Raheem Morris is a really optimistic guy: Trailing by 6 points with 4:30 left in the game, the Buccaneers faced a 4th and goal from Washington’s 4-yard line. The Bucs kicked the FG to make the score 16-13 and went on to lose. Columnist Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times wants to know why head coach Raheem Morris didn’t go for the touchdown. That makes at least two of us.

[A]ll things being equal the better decision would have been to go for it. . . .  Morris’ decision basically cut his chances of winning by a third.  Sure, the particular “flow” and match-ups of the game are factors, but those considerations are usually overblown. Besides, if the game is close enough for it to matter, then the two teams are probably fairly equal, at least for that day.

[But] the more interesting thing is the glimpse inside the mind of an NFL coach. Here’s what Morris said when asked about the decision:

“We wanted to stop them, get the ball back, have an opportunity to go down there and put this thing into overtime. Or to win it. I felt really good about that. It worked out in our favor.”

Notice that actually winning the game was almost an afterthought. Overtime was the goal. Here’s the chain of events Morris was counting on:

1. Make the FG
2. Make a stop (on the first or second series, so that there is time left)
3. Drive into FG range
4. Make a second FG
5. Score first in overtime, which requires:
6. (Half the time) Make another stop
7. Drive into FG range again, and
8. Make a third FG, or score a TD

And here’s the ‘go for it’ path to winning:

1. Get 4 yards on a play
2. Make a stop

Which alternative is more plausible? What does this say about the mentality of some NFL coaches? An 0-3 team is 4 yards and a stop away from their first win, and they decide to play the long odds for shot at overtime.

- Safire Sundays. Language Log on William Safire.

- Unlawfully harboring a D-1 talent? Jenks HS Coach Allan Trimble suspends himself after a report emerged showing that he had arranged for a player to live within his district.

- BGS counters up. The Blue-Gray Sky has a nice look at Notre Dame running their “counter play” from a one-back set.

Scenario 2: Your team is up 21-17. The other team has the ball on roughly your two-yard line. Thirty-six seconds remain; they have just run the ball on second down so the clock is moving. They have no timeouts, but you have all three of yours. The other team has just quickly driven the field to get into this position. Question: do you call timeout to preserve some time for yourself in the chance that they score a touchdown on third or fourth down? Or do you leave the pressure on them to execute on those two downs over thirty-six seconds. What do you do?

Analysis (and identities of the coaches) after the jump.

Scenario 1 – What actually happened: Mike Leach, with his team leading 28-23, called a quarterback sneak on fourth and one that was stopped. His team eventually lost to Houston, 29-28, in the waning seconds. Unsurprisingly, he has taken a lot of heat for not kicking the field goal. Indeed, it looks like he has even recanted, saying, “If I put the field goal team out there, at that point in the game that’s the better thing to do,” Leach said. “And I didn’t do it.” But should he feel bad?

I’m not so sure. I will say this for certain: if it is the first half, I think we can all absolutely agree that he going for it was the right call. Fourth and one is quite literally almost always worth it from just about anywhere on the field, and especially so on the goal line. The analysis goes something like this, though see the link above for more: Afield goal attempt has an expected value of about 2.5 points (the chance of making it multiplied by three). The value of “going for it” is a bit murkier, but from that part of the field the chance is worth about four points, give or take some of the yardage values. You arrive at this number by taking the chance of success times six, plus the subsequent chance at a good PAT times one, plus factoring in the opponent’s horrible field position if you fail. These numbers are fairly quantifiable, and even if they aren’t to an exact degree we know that four, the expected value of going for it, is higher than two-and-a-half. (Again, people often treat field goals as if they were automatic.)

The question is whether things change that late in the game, in the fourth quarter. Going back to Urban Meyer, I think that depends on the flow of the game and the type of opponent. And the biggest criterion is whether you think there will be more scoring. My sense is that Leach’s impulse was that eight points was probably not enough to straight win the game at that point (Houston wound up with over 600 yards of offense), though, with perfect knowledge in hindsight, it turns out that it would have been. But these decisions are made ex ante, and it still strikes me as the right one.

Now a lot of people who are understandably upset, maybe Leach himself, say, “Well, even if I agree with the call to go for it the playcall was bad.” There might be something to this but it strikes me generally as a copout way to say “I just disagree because it didn’t work.” Now the QB sneak itself was pretty ugly, so maybe it could have been practiced better, but it’s not like the team doesn’t work on the sneak or that isn’t the most direct way to convert those plays.

In any event, I’m curious if there are any comments on the call to go for it. I am looking for real analysis though, not just monday morning quarterbacking. I am legitimately interested in the best way to view these decisions as time begins to get more scarce late in games. I think the data supports the idea that the fourth and one on the one is quite literally always the right call in the first half.

Scenario 2 – What actually happened. Danny Hope, Purdue’s first year coach, called a timeout with 36 seconds left. It turns out, however, that Notre Dame’s head coach, Charlie Weis, had signaled in the “spike play” to be run on third down. As a result, because we know what Weis’s decision was going to be, the result of Hope’s timeout was to give Notre Dame two chances to score — one on third down and another on fourth — rather than one (a spike on third down and just a fourth down play). Many people excoriated Hope, including the announcers, and well, me, via twitter. But now I’m not so sure I was right. Several people pointed to my own article, which makes clear that Notre Dame had no need to spike the ball on third down — thirty-six seconds is plenty of time to run two plays. And here’s Hope’s defense of his call in his own words:

“I want to retract my statement from last night. Last night, I wasn’t sure it was the right call, but now that I look (back) at it, I’m sure it was the right call, in spite of what a lot of the experts and the critics think.

“You know, it was second-and-goal and they ran it. I was on the headset with Coach (Gary) Nord and any time you get down there, on first- or second-and-goal inside the 5-yard line, the probability of getting a touchdown is pretty good. … I don’t know what the statistics would say, but it’s very significant, the chances that when you get down there, you’re going to score.

“If that was going to be the case, we needed to get in a position to get a field goal to go into overtime or a touchdown to win. We couldn’t do that if there wasn’t any time left on the clock. I was on the headset with Coach Nord and said that if they threw a pass, one of two things would happen, that they might get a touchdown or they might throw an incompletion that would stop the clock. But if they ran the ball and it’s not a touchdown, the clock’s going to keep running, and I don’t want to run out of time.

So I got the official’s attention (and said) that if they ran the ball and it wasn’t a touchdown, that I wanted to call a timeout as soon as I could to save as much time as I could on the clock. I don’t have any reservation about that at all.”

I think this is quite persuasive. Now, again, with hindsight, the only scenario that would make the timeout a bad idea actually was the one happening: that Charlie Weis would make the amateurish call to waste third down by unnecessarily spiking the ball on third-and-goal with over 30 seconds left, which was plenty of time to run two plays. But how could Hope know that? I suppose you could say you could wait to see if your opponent was going to do something so lucky for you, but that might waste precious seconds.

And it offends my sense of order to say that Hope erred by not presuming that his adversary would do something so suboptimal, even if [insert Charlie Weis joke]. Unfortunately for Hope, he saved Weis from himself, but otherwise he left Purdue in a better position than it would be otherwise: ND still had two chances to score, and Purdue still had more time than it would have had otherwise to put together a drive. Although it didn’t work out for Purdue, that Charlie Weis after all these years doesn’t know his clock management well enough to see what a huge waste of a down spiking the ball would have been with that much time is his problem, not Hope’s. They just need to play better defense in that situation (i.e. not giving 25 yard cushions on third and 18 to give up the 20 yard comeback….).

But, as with the Mike Leach scenario, comments and criticisms necessary. And, for this second one, apologies to Coach Hope as I initially thought it was the wrong call. I retract.

- Clock mismanagement. The commentary after the Dolphins lost to the Colts was partially about how much time of possession matters (my view is not that much, but I have more to say on it later), but even more about the ‘Phins awful clock management at the end of the game. And it was bad.

The biggest issue was they had no sense of urgency. I do not like teams that scramble and run around frenetically, but they were very lazy about it. They wasted a lot of valuable seconds, and there is little reason the game should have ended on second down from where they were on the field. They also spiked the ball unnecessarily. As I’ve said before, in college a spike is almost never necessary, except to get your kicking team on to the field. In the NFL, because the clock doesn’t stop except on out of bounds, incomplete passes, timeouts, and the two minute warning, a clock play might be necessary if there is a gang tackle and time is flowing off the clock, etc. But I’m still very skeptical because I firmly believe you can call a play with the same amount of communication as necessary to indicate a spike play. In this case though the Dolphins bad clock management overshadowed their improper spike because they ran out of time rather than downs.

How can you get better? Here’s the best drill I know of for being ready for the two-minute drill. It should be used to finish practice at least once a week, and I know of a team that ends every practice with it. The ball is placed on the practice field at either the 5 or 10. The quarterback and first team take the field; the coaches line up on the sidelines, just as if it is a real game. (You need a manager or ref to set the ball.) The point is to replicate the game-like scenario. You can use it against no defense but it is best I think to go live against the first or second team defense (and work on that planning as well), but don’t use any tackling to the ground. (I.e. routes, blocks, etc are fully speed but no tackling.)

The offense then runs its plays but, after every play, regardless of the play’s outcome, the ball is set 10 yards ahead, i.e. to the 15 or 20 and so on. The coaches signal the play in (or the quarterback does), the players deal with the time management, and the coaches keep a stopwatch.

This way you can rep all your plays getting down the field, but since you always move it forward the drill has a finite period of time. The important things are to practice (a) communication — the drill only works if the coaches sit on the sideline like they are supposed to, (b) pace, (c) the plays that will get used in the two-minute, particularly near the goal line, and (d) just building familiarity.

As expected, all this is easier if the team already has a robust no-huddle package, as the communication would stay the same. (All teams should have such a package. Huddling wastes more time in practice than anywhere else.)

- mgogreat. Brian Cook has caught the strategy bug pretty hard, and has done a great job explaining some of Rich Rodriguez’s plays (along with doing the invaluable work of finding video clips for everything). Spread junkies of all types should check out his series on the zone read, the scrape exchange, and various counters thereto: (1) scraping, bubbling, (2) scrape, counterpunch (very good one where Rodriguez sent H-back across the formation to kick out the unblocked DE while the LB takes himself out of the play), (3) cut it up, Tate!, and (4) why people scrape (base zone read defense look).

These are all very good. If I can add anything, it is that the zone-read is a very good concept, as are these adjustments, both offensively and defensively, so the defensive reaction on the backside is something like how they approach pass coverage against a very good quarterback: as important as what you do is is that you mix it up, and keep varying the looks. It’s important to have the base look, the scrape, etc. But if the offense has counters, which it clearly does, then sometimes the best you can do is to keep them guessing.

- Spurrier, redux. Spurrier has South Carolina winning again, and they are again doing it with defense, beating Ole Miss last night 16-10. Not much to say other than that Ole Miss just didn’t look like a good team, and their offensive problems, which were many, began up front. (Hello Eric Norwood!) But Spurrier’s playcalling seems to get very tight late in games. When they got the lead things got very conservative and then predictable. Now, some of this is that USC has never had a potent straight-ahead power run game under the Ol’ Ball Coach, so when they try to just pound it they wind up with a lot of 2nd and 10s and 3rd and 8s. But even the passes were kinda lame, or simply forced. In other words, Spurrier seems to really tighten up with that late lead, and get out of the flow of his playcalling. (His playcalling against Georgia was generally very good, partially because it was happening so fast that there was no time to think and that he knew they had to keep the gas on to keep up.)

- For Whom The Rich Brooks Tolls. Every bit of this is awesome.

- Coach Speak with Brian Billick. Not bad. Make sure to catch the corner blitz breakdown after he talks with Rex Ryan.