On analytics in football -
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...th-downs-2-point-conversions-lane-kiffin-next
"Watching games, some of the decisions that coaches were making just didn't seem right to me," he said. "I was on a road trip for business, and I went into Excel and started to do some calculations. The math really didn't match up to the choices."
He got his hands on some college football play-by-play data and started crunching numbers. "What occurred to me was that there are a lot of tools out there, but there really weren't many people trying to help the coaches themselves make decisions" on matters like fourth downs and 2-point conversions, he said. "That really became the inspiration. Could we put together something where, if a situation came up in the game, we could give a coach the mathematical recommendation to use as part of the decision-making process?"
This question became the raison d'etre for forming Championship Analytics, or CAI.
It started with one school, then a few, then a few more. Now CAI provides decision books for more than half the teams in the FBS, plus four NFL teams and teams at both the small-college and high school levels.
"There was not a gigantic mission at the start," McRoberts said. "It was truly just crunching some numbers in a spreadsheet when I got stuck in a storm in Buffalo. And here we are."
One of CAI's first public breakthroughs came in 2017 and '18, when Army, a CAI client, went a combined 21-5. The Black Knights played the margins beautifully, not only attempting 66 fourth-down conversions but succeeding on 50 of them and going 10-3 in games decided by one score. Head coach Jeff Monken openly referenced to the media the help CAI had provided his team.
Only two teams went for it more than Army in this span, albeit with fewer successes: rival Navy and Florida Atlantic, with a staggering 83 fourth-down attempts. FAU's head coach at the time? Lane Kiffin.
Kiffin had already lived a full football life -- USC offensive coordinator at age 30, Oakland Raiders head coach at 32, fired USC head coach at 38 -- when he landed the offensive coordinator gig for Nick Saban at Alabama in 2014. By the end of his three seasons in Tuscaloosa, the Tide had become a CAI client, and Kiffin had gotten a chance to peruse their materials, immerse himself in their game books and realize just how many of his, and most coaches', assumptions were flawed.
He quickly concluded that if or when he got another head-coaching opportunity, he would commit to innovation in two ways. First, he would combine a lot of pro-style concepts and present-day bells and whistles (motion, et al) with what he called "Baylor tempo," reminiscent of the 85-plays-per-game Baylor offenses of the early 2010s. Second, he would go all-in on the math. He would quickly become CAI's most vocal client.
After winning two Conference USA titles in three years at FAU, Kiffin earned a trip back to the SEC as head coach at Ole Miss, and he has remained committed to those initial tenets. Over the past two seasons, his Rebels have averaged more snaps (78.9) and more fourth-down conversion attempts per game (3.6) than anyone else in the FBS. Sometimes it works beautifully, as when Ole Miss went 4-for-4 on fourth downs against eventual national champion Alabama and had the Tide on the ropes deep into the fourth quarter. Other times, it fails for all to see, as when the Rebels went a Chargers-esque 2-for-5 against Bama in 2021, failed on the first two drives of the game and got blown out.
"You're supposed to go for it a lot in situations that people aren't used to seeing," Kiffin said. "That makes it challenging because when you don't get it, not only does it look bad, it looks bad in front of 100,000 people and national TV and you're answering to the media afterward, and the announcers are saying how dumb that is."
He likened the risk to playing blackjack: Knowing the odds, when to hit on 16, etc., is one thing, but pulling the trigger with actual money on the line is another. "You've got thousands of dollars down on that hand, and it gets a lot harder to hit."
That has proven true at both the college and professional levels of football, but like Staley, Kiffin has shown he's willing to hit, and it has paid off. He took over an Ole Miss program that had gone just 20-28 over four seasons while working back from NCAA sanctions; after a 5-5 debut, his Rebels went 10-3 in 2021. Their No. 11 finish in the AP poll was their second best since 1969.
Ole Miss' fourth-down usage remains an outlier, but at both the college and professional levels -- where every NFL team is employing analytics professionals at this point -- the trends are clear.
Over the course of five seasons, FBS teams went from going for it 60% of the time on fourth-and-1 to 74% -- 92% of the time in opponents' territory and 48% in their own. NFL teams, meanwhile, went from going for it 44% of the time to 70%. On fourth-and-2, college teams went for it 13 percentage points more, NFL teams 23 percentage points more. The math favors going for it on longer fourth downs even more than that in plenty of scenarios, so there's still room for growth, but that is a massive shift in a short amount of time.
"The whole fourth-downs thing is visually obvious," Football Outsiders' Aaron Schatz said. "That dramatically changed in 2018 and has been very different since."
"It's exploded, frankly," said Brian Burke of ESPN Stats & Information. "There's lots of ways to measure fourth-down stuff, and it's so situational that you can't just look at raw fourth-down go-for-it rates, but even if you just look at that, it's doubling, if only because the base rate was so low."
"But in all these areas," ESPN's Seth Walder continued, "fourth downs, two points, teams don't behave optimally on those yet."
"There are the [NFL] teams that themselves have the resources to develop their own models, and some use vendors to provide models," Burke said. "They're using it for more than just fourth downs, too. Obviously 2-point conversions, but all kinds of game management stuff -- taking intentional penalties near the goal line, onside kicks, clock management stuff. You've got some teams with an analytics person in the booth now on the headsets," which, among other things, can help teams to avoid wasting timeouts.
"I think another big change is, teams are thinking of their third-down playcall in conjunction with the fourth-down recommendation," McRoberts said. "Third-and-7 is not automatic throw to the sticks and the binary zero-one result -- maybe they throw a pass short of it or even run just to try to, if nothing else, get themselves in that fourth-down 'go' range."
At the NFL level, 35% of fourth downs now require 4 or fewer yards to go as opposed to 31% in 2017, which suggests that pro teams are indeed doing a better job of setting up these opportunities. (That data hasn't changed much at the college level just yet.)
"We explain the philosophy to the players early on here," Kiffin said. "They understand our aggressive style -- whether it's fakes, whether it's fourth downs, whether it's a lot of blitzes, whatever it is, they know it's belief in the players. That's belief that you're gonna make a play."
Of course, there's one more unit that needs fourth-down affirmation: the defense.
"The defense also understands that this is about analytics," Kiffin said. "This is not because we don't believe in the defense. If you don't explain that, if your team doesn't understand what you're doing, it can backfire because the defense thinks, well, they're going for it 'cause they don't think we can stop them."
It's also OK to occasionally put faith in the punter.
"It's a huge factor in the models that if it's expected to be a low-scoring game, and you've got a phenomenal punter, that fourth-and-1 is not an automatic go all the time in minus territory," McRoberts said. "There are definitely circumstances where punting is the play."
"We play Texas A&M, and we go for it on the 1 and don't make it," Kiffin said, recalling the Rebels' 2021 game against the Aggies. "Probably most people watching this know, 'You take the three points.' A lot of very successful coaches would take the three because that's just what you're trained to do. When you don't make it, 'Oh, it's so bad, it's so bad,' but now the ball is on the 1, and you have a chance to get a safety and get the ball back."
That's exactly what happened against Jimbo Fisher's Aggies. After a fourth-down failure by the Ole Miss offense in the second quarter -- which followed a fourth-and-2 touchdown in the first quarter -- the Rebels' Chance Campbell and Mark Robinson stuffed Isaiah Spiller in the end zone for a safety, giving Ole Miss a 15-0 lead en route to a 29-19 upset win.
A&M's only fourth-down attempt, by the way, came in the final minute in a desperation situation. This wasn't much of a surprise -- the Aggies had just 10 fourth-down attempts all season, fewest in the nation.
"It's everybody's choice whether you follow analytics or not," Kiffin said, "but you know when you're playing certain coaches, well, if we're playing A&M, and it's fourth-and-1, no matter where the ball is we're just sending out our punt return team. They're going to punt. That's Jimbo, and I think he's even quoted as saying, you know, 'The game's not played in a book, I'm not looking at a stupid book.'"
Fisher's Aggies have gone a combined 17-5 over the past two seasons, of course, just as the fourth-down allergic Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl in 2021. Punting on fourth-and-short doesn't automatically prevent teams from winning games. But the past few seasons have shown that more coaches are coming to understand that in many instances, punting is the risk, as opposed to going for it.
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...th-downs-2-point-conversions-lane-kiffin-next
State of analytics in college football: Fourth downs, 2-point conversions, Lane Kiffin and what's next
How Lane Kiffin gave the nerds a boost
Michael McRoberts was working for a credit bureau a decade or so ago when curiosity got the best of him."Watching games, some of the decisions that coaches were making just didn't seem right to me," he said. "I was on a road trip for business, and I went into Excel and started to do some calculations. The math really didn't match up to the choices."
He got his hands on some college football play-by-play data and started crunching numbers. "What occurred to me was that there are a lot of tools out there, but there really weren't many people trying to help the coaches themselves make decisions" on matters like fourth downs and 2-point conversions, he said. "That really became the inspiration. Could we put together something where, if a situation came up in the game, we could give a coach the mathematical recommendation to use as part of the decision-making process?"
This question became the raison d'etre for forming Championship Analytics, or CAI.
It started with one school, then a few, then a few more. Now CAI provides decision books for more than half the teams in the FBS, plus four NFL teams and teams at both the small-college and high school levels.
"There was not a gigantic mission at the start," McRoberts said. "It was truly just crunching some numbers in a spreadsheet when I got stuck in a storm in Buffalo. And here we are."
One of CAI's first public breakthroughs came in 2017 and '18, when Army, a CAI client, went a combined 21-5. The Black Knights played the margins beautifully, not only attempting 66 fourth-down conversions but succeeding on 50 of them and going 10-3 in games decided by one score. Head coach Jeff Monken openly referenced to the media the help CAI had provided his team.
Only two teams went for it more than Army in this span, albeit with fewer successes: rival Navy and Florida Atlantic, with a staggering 83 fourth-down attempts. FAU's head coach at the time? Lane Kiffin.
Kiffin had already lived a full football life -- USC offensive coordinator at age 30, Oakland Raiders head coach at 32, fired USC head coach at 38 -- when he landed the offensive coordinator gig for Nick Saban at Alabama in 2014. By the end of his three seasons in Tuscaloosa, the Tide had become a CAI client, and Kiffin had gotten a chance to peruse their materials, immerse himself in their game books and realize just how many of his, and most coaches', assumptions were flawed.
He quickly concluded that if or when he got another head-coaching opportunity, he would commit to innovation in two ways. First, he would combine a lot of pro-style concepts and present-day bells and whistles (motion, et al) with what he called "Baylor tempo," reminiscent of the 85-plays-per-game Baylor offenses of the early 2010s. Second, he would go all-in on the math. He would quickly become CAI's most vocal client.
After winning two Conference USA titles in three years at FAU, Kiffin earned a trip back to the SEC as head coach at Ole Miss, and he has remained committed to those initial tenets. Over the past two seasons, his Rebels have averaged more snaps (78.9) and more fourth-down conversion attempts per game (3.6) than anyone else in the FBS. Sometimes it works beautifully, as when Ole Miss went 4-for-4 on fourth downs against eventual national champion Alabama and had the Tide on the ropes deep into the fourth quarter. Other times, it fails for all to see, as when the Rebels went a Chargers-esque 2-for-5 against Bama in 2021, failed on the first two drives of the game and got blown out.
"You're supposed to go for it a lot in situations that people aren't used to seeing," Kiffin said. "That makes it challenging because when you don't get it, not only does it look bad, it looks bad in front of 100,000 people and national TV and you're answering to the media afterward, and the announcers are saying how dumb that is."
He likened the risk to playing blackjack: Knowing the odds, when to hit on 16, etc., is one thing, but pulling the trigger with actual money on the line is another. "You've got thousands of dollars down on that hand, and it gets a lot harder to hit."
That has proven true at both the college and professional levels of football, but like Staley, Kiffin has shown he's willing to hit, and it has paid off. He took over an Ole Miss program that had gone just 20-28 over four seasons while working back from NCAA sanctions; after a 5-5 debut, his Rebels went 10-3 in 2021. Their No. 11 finish in the AP poll was their second best since 1969.
Ole Miss' fourth-down usage remains an outlier, but at both the college and professional levels -- where every NFL team is employing analytics professionals at this point -- the trends are clear.
Over the course of five seasons, FBS teams went from going for it 60% of the time on fourth-and-1 to 74% -- 92% of the time in opponents' territory and 48% in their own. NFL teams, meanwhile, went from going for it 44% of the time to 70%. On fourth-and-2, college teams went for it 13 percentage points more, NFL teams 23 percentage points more. The math favors going for it on longer fourth downs even more than that in plenty of scenarios, so there's still room for growth, but that is a massive shift in a short amount of time.
"The whole fourth-downs thing is visually obvious," Football Outsiders' Aaron Schatz said. "That dramatically changed in 2018 and has been very different since."
"It's exploded, frankly," said Brian Burke of ESPN Stats & Information. "There's lots of ways to measure fourth-down stuff, and it's so situational that you can't just look at raw fourth-down go-for-it rates, but even if you just look at that, it's doubling, if only because the base rate was so low."
"But in all these areas," ESPN's Seth Walder continued, "fourth downs, two points, teams don't behave optimally on those yet."
"There are the [NFL] teams that themselves have the resources to develop their own models, and some use vendors to provide models," Burke said. "They're using it for more than just fourth downs, too. Obviously 2-point conversions, but all kinds of game management stuff -- taking intentional penalties near the goal line, onside kicks, clock management stuff. You've got some teams with an analytics person in the booth now on the headsets," which, among other things, can help teams to avoid wasting timeouts.
"I think another big change is, teams are thinking of their third-down playcall in conjunction with the fourth-down recommendation," McRoberts said. "Third-and-7 is not automatic throw to the sticks and the binary zero-one result -- maybe they throw a pass short of it or even run just to try to, if nothing else, get themselves in that fourth-down 'go' range."
At the NFL level, 35% of fourth downs now require 4 or fewer yards to go as opposed to 31% in 2017, which suggests that pro teams are indeed doing a better job of setting up these opportunities. (That data hasn't changed much at the college level just yet.)
"We explain the philosophy to the players early on here," Kiffin said. "They understand our aggressive style -- whether it's fakes, whether it's fourth downs, whether it's a lot of blitzes, whatever it is, they know it's belief in the players. That's belief that you're gonna make a play."
Of course, there's one more unit that needs fourth-down affirmation: the defense.
"The defense also understands that this is about analytics," Kiffin said. "This is not because we don't believe in the defense. If you don't explain that, if your team doesn't understand what you're doing, it can backfire because the defense thinks, well, they're going for it 'cause they don't think we can stop them."
It's also OK to occasionally put faith in the punter.
"It's a huge factor in the models that if it's expected to be a low-scoring game, and you've got a phenomenal punter, that fourth-and-1 is not an automatic go all the time in minus territory," McRoberts said. "There are definitely circumstances where punting is the play."
"We play Texas A&M, and we go for it on the 1 and don't make it," Kiffin said, recalling the Rebels' 2021 game against the Aggies. "Probably most people watching this know, 'You take the three points.' A lot of very successful coaches would take the three because that's just what you're trained to do. When you don't make it, 'Oh, it's so bad, it's so bad,' but now the ball is on the 1, and you have a chance to get a safety and get the ball back."
That's exactly what happened against Jimbo Fisher's Aggies. After a fourth-down failure by the Ole Miss offense in the second quarter -- which followed a fourth-and-2 touchdown in the first quarter -- the Rebels' Chance Campbell and Mark Robinson stuffed Isaiah Spiller in the end zone for a safety, giving Ole Miss a 15-0 lead en route to a 29-19 upset win.
A&M's only fourth-down attempt, by the way, came in the final minute in a desperation situation. This wasn't much of a surprise -- the Aggies had just 10 fourth-down attempts all season, fewest in the nation.
"It's everybody's choice whether you follow analytics or not," Kiffin said, "but you know when you're playing certain coaches, well, if we're playing A&M, and it's fourth-and-1, no matter where the ball is we're just sending out our punt return team. They're going to punt. That's Jimbo, and I think he's even quoted as saying, you know, 'The game's not played in a book, I'm not looking at a stupid book.'"
Fisher's Aggies have gone a combined 17-5 over the past two seasons, of course, just as the fourth-down allergic Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl in 2021. Punting on fourth-and-short doesn't automatically prevent teams from winning games. But the past few seasons have shown that more coaches are coming to understand that in many instances, punting is the risk, as opposed to going for it.
