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 prompt for better results!" I'm forbidding you from having an opinion on coaching decisions going forward. "Can you do that?" I don't know, better check the numbers, and by numbers I mean binary number, 0 or 1, yes or no, those are all you'll see from "ESPN Analytics". You telling me these ESPN fans've done a regression on the scatter plots for situational fourth down conversions? 

Well Ben Johnson has ran the numbers, and the numbers told him to go for it all the goddamned time. Like top-5 in the NFL for going for it on fourth down. How'd that work out for us?

Yup, that's bottom 4 in the NFL in fourth down conversions, my friends. "Is it because D'Andre Swift is so blind he needs a guide dog to pick his nose?" I mean it doesn't help, but the reality is a big part of the "numbers" saying to go for it on fourth down are from the days of freaking Dave Wannstedt, where knowing what a shotgun was was enough to earn you the moniker of offensive guru. The analytics revolution began in 2017, we're a full decade in at this point. We're Tesla owners following maintenance practices based on stats from studies conducted on Oldsmobiles. "It says here the defense won't expect you to go for it, and also it's time to overhaul your carburetor". I'm sure it does.

Even after a full season of being one of the most aggressive, least effective fourth down offenses in the NFL, Ben still went for it on 4th down in the playoff game against the Rams six times. SIX TIMES. We only converted three of them! Ben Johnson is effectively responsible for three turnovers against the Rams. Could you imagine the reaction if Caleb Williams was responsible for three turnovers in a playoff loss of 3 points? Would the analytics folks deride anyone who had a finger to raise there? Or would the analytics community universally agree that Caleb's three turnovers were one of the main contributors to the Bears' three-point loss to the Rams, two of which were in field goal range?

Once again - IN A GAME LOST BY 3 POINTS, BEN JOHNSON'S FOURTH DOWN FETISH CAUSED 2 TURNOVERS IN SCORING RANGE.

"Well he's just following the analytics! The numbers say to go for it!"

SAYS WHO? You haven't ran the numbers! You have one low-res chart from Ben Baldwin with a hard delineation devoid of historical context. In the words of some folks who have an actual understanding of statistics - "Analytics, Have Some Humility"

If you did:

Hey, look at that! Gradient areas! And that's using the whole dataset, going back decades. When you consider individual plays, especially individual plays post-analytics revolution, you get—

In particular, we are confident in just 34% of all fourth-down decisions from 2018 to 2022 and a whopping 40% of them are uncertain. 

— not a binary result, but a haze of probability. Not definition, but uncertainty. 

And look at those win probability changes - you're talking over sample sizes of thousands, over decades, there's a trend of ~1-5%, maybe. So, is it true that, over the vast, noisy ocean that is the NFL sample size over the past few decades, a trend can be seen? Totally. Does that trend mean that coaches who do not always go for it on fourth down when "analytics say it's the right call" should be mocked and derided for "not understanding the analytics"? No, dammit, the analytics don't say that, could never say that. To quote a title from a study about three paragraphs up - have some humility.

In fact, per the above study from 2024, Ben Johnson and Dan Campbell's Lions were among the least analytically defensible.

When you combine that recklessness with the fact that the Bears were one of the least effective 4th down offenses in the NFL last year, it cannot be said enough - Ben Johnson is not going for it because it's "what the analytics" recommends -

— he's doing it because he's a Jack the Ripper-level psychopath who, instead of prostitutes, has chosen opposing NFL teams as the victims of his psychosis.