Ben, I Beg of You - Stop Going for it on Fourth Down, You Maniac
If you're reading this, you know all the talking points already— Football coaches are, as a rule, antiquated, dogma-fueled, and generally optimized towards minimizing probability of embarrassment rather than maximizing probability of wining. The standard decision of kicking or punting on 4th down rather than going for it is based on mitigating humiliation, and flies in the face of analytics, which unequivocally point to coaches being laughably conservative, IE - " Punt, kick or go for it on fourth down? Method to NFL analytics models - ESPN ": Analytics! There's a consensus on the "why" as well - NFL coaches don't understand the numbers, analytics, or really even statistics in general. ...except that's complete horseshit. Fans haven't ran the numbers and don't understand the analytics. The average NFL fan can't get through a fantasy football draft without 13 legs up from ChatGPT. "Well if you ask it, ChatGPT can help you refine your...