Interesting Paper on 4th downs

[Lidderer]

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/users/dromer/papers/PAPER_NFL_JULY05_FORWEB_CORRECTED.pdf

David Romer's 2005 work regarding "[e]xamination of teams’ actual decisions shows systematic, clear-cut, and overwhelmingly statistically significant departures from the decisions that would maximize teams’ chances of winning."

possible insights include:

--"Moving 10 yards from your own 1 to your own 11 is worth the same amount of points as moving 23 yards from your 11 to your 34"

--A turnover is equally damaging independant of where it occurs on the field, assuming all things are equal

--assigns a numerical point value to any 1st and 10 on any point in the field.

[Lidderer]

there's also a somewhat related paper discussing poor managing of threads.

www.orangemane.com/users/lidderer/threadIdeas.html

[watermock]

That thread is a mile back. What stats don't show is the momentum of an event of stopping a team in their own 40. They might look at the resulting momentum of such an event.

Actually, Shanahan wasn't chicken at all about going for it if he had something set up in his evil mind, and rarely waivered. Kicking 4th and 2 from your 7, your going to have to go max protect, the punter has to get it off quick. How many times have you seen a team punt out of the end zone only to see a returner get it to the 35 or better anyway?

The reason I say the 35 is because several times I see teams punt from the 37 or so and kick it into the end zone! So they gain a 17 yard gain! Teams can very often break a back with a 4th down conversion.

[Lidderer]

there's actually a related article that ATTEMPTS to detail how momentum is non-existant.

I'll try and dig that up for you. But if I can't:

See Gilovich, Vallone, Tversky in 1985("the hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences"), Albright in 1993("A statistical analysis of hitting streaks in baseball"), and Klaasen and Magnus in 2001("Are points in tennis identical and equally distributed?")