rockaction
Footballguy
Because, first of all, they couldn't run out the clock? Brady and the Pats would have had around ten-fifteen seconds to gain whatever they could on the kick return and the subsequent plays and kick a field goal. Addressing the return, any penalties on the return, the subsequent plays post-return relative to the timeout situation, and the expected point total of those while normalizing for distance needed, points needed, and time of game would help, for starters. I think of this, from smartfootball.com, which applies to baseball also. Brown's quote is in italics, within his quote, there is another quote to illustrate his point.Forget pressure and everything else. Boil it down to these two questions.1. How likely do you think it is that they don't make the FG?It's not poker. It's not a video game. I want the lead when I have a chance to take it. I want the other guy to feel the pressure of trailing with the clock ticking down.So youd rather have the 88% chance of winning than the 98% chance of winning? I dont get this line of thinkingExactly my thinking. If I were the Giants, I would rather put the game in the hands of my defense up more than 3 than take a shot on a field goal with 40 less seconds on the clock.'jagbag said:'bicycle_seat_sniffer said:
Get the damn points when they are given to you.
2. How likely do you think it is that Tom Brady and the Pats score a TD with one minute and a timeout to work with?
If the answer to #2 is larger than the answer to #1, then you should run out the clock and kick the FG.
Why do I feel that having this argument is akin to trying to convince people that a player's actions don't affect the probability of a dealer going bust in blackjack? Or trying to convince people that OPS, WAR, etc. are most useful statistical measures of baseball ability than batting average and home runs?
I'm not a true statistician or econometrician. And, as I said above, one of the difficulties with doing real, relevant football statistics is that the game is quite complex, and one needs to understand it to model it (and those who understand usually can't model, and those who can model usually don't understand). One of my goals with this site is to try to help bridge this gap. Nocera's piece begins with this quote from Peter Bernstein's book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.
The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.
And it will remain controversial -- in finance as well as football -- because the future will be paved by numbers and judgment, marching, somewhat awkwardly, hand in hand.
This is part of the reason why baseball stats took so long. And when people flubbed the premises, or talked in statistical abstractions, or insisted on statistical purity instead of saying something simple like, "OPS is a measure of how often you get on and how far you get on when you do" they undermined their own points.
It's faulty premises mixed with bad pedagogical decisions that call everything into question. It adds to the difficulty of getting people to understand certain concepts (there are differing cognitive abilities and relative strengths within) and then adopt and incorporate those concepts into their decision-making (there are differing goals involved in decision-making, Americans are noted for being empirical and anecdotal rather than theoretical, there are subjective notions of risk aversion, etc.)
I understand the odds as given in this thread, but what happens in week 3 against Jacksonville (or any other random team) isn't relative to me. You have to take the points in the Super Bowl.
