Fourth and Two

Bill Belichek widely admired (or, depending on one’s perspective, reviled) as a cold-hearted football coaching genius, was widely attacked for, against conventional wisdom, choosing to go for a fourth and two from his own 29 and losing the game. Two New York Times blogs (here and here) defend the decision, calculating that he made the statistically correct decision for the team, if not for his career. Bill Simmons undermines that statistical argument by noting that the assumed odds of making a fourth and two are meaningfully different than converting a two point conversion.

Given the ultimate fuzziness of the statistical argument, whether one condemns or defends Belichek’s choice would seem to reduce, more or less, to whether one prefers to defer to, or align with, the genius coach or the accepted practice.

It is worth understanding that beneath the presented alternatives lie divergent sets of values. The accepted practice, in the end, argues that the Patriots should not have beaten themselves. If Indy was able to drive seventy yards in two minutes for the touchdown, they deserved the win. To this way of thinking, the job of a coach is not as much to directly give his team the best chance of winning, as it is to put the best team on the field. Belichek supporters disregard the testimony of former players – since, to some degree, supported by the Patriots subsequent performance -- that Belichek’s choice came at the expense of the product-on-the-field.

In the end, Belicheck likely did not have finely tuned statistical analysis on hand. The call more likely came from his gut. As he described it, he saw a chance to win and took it.