The Coach That Never Punts

[Hillsdale87]

I'd look at the metrics totally differently. I'd look at it in terms of yards. Everytime you miss a 4th down, it costs you 35-40 yards. Thus if you miss on say three 4th downs, you've cost yourself over 100 yards. That's hard to make up.

I'd love to play a team that never punts.

You make it up pretty easily by converting a number of those 4th downs. If you convert on 4th down more often than you punt, you are likely to end up with more yards than had you followed a traditional strategy. And based on the fact that this team has recently won 3 straight championships, I'd guess that teams aren't that excited to play them...

[IslandRed]

You make it up pretty easily by converting a number of those 4th downs. If you convert on 4th down more often than you punt, you are likely to end up with more yards than had you followed a traditional strategy. And based on the fact that this team has recently won 3 straight championships, I'd guess that teams aren't that excited to play them...

Right. Of course, there's a selection bias at work -- if the team is so good that it can expect to make fourth downs regardless of yards to go or field position, it's probably going to win regardless of strategy. We'd have to have a control group of let-it-all-hang-out-but-we're-mediocre teams to know for sure.

[Sea Ray]

You make it up pretty easily by converting a number of those 4th downs. If you convert on 4th down more often than you punt, you are likely to end up with more yards than had you followed a traditional strategy. And based on the fact that this team has recently won 3 straight championships, I'd guess that teams aren't that excited to play them...

It's quite possible that there's such a competitive imbalance in that area that the team would have won 3 championships regardless. In a competitive league, it'd be as dumb as hell to play it like that

[CTA513]

If I was a coach that did this I would have to think my players would eventually start getting hurt.