Dear Mike Leach,

2 Responses to “Dear Mike Leach,”

1. PrinceofHouston says:

   September 26, 2009 at 11:55 pm

   the fact that Potts tipped the play the way he set his foot before the snap didn’t help.
   But…Houston doesn’t suck this year. Tech got beat yes, but they did not lose to a nobody team. This is a team that took OSU to the woodshed at their own house.
   Yes we should have won. Yes we looked discombobulated at times, but Houston is scrappy.
2. Zeem says:

   September 29, 2009 at 8:57 am

   http://smartfootball.com/game-management/two-coaching-decisions-a-review

   Scenario 1: Your team is up 28-23, though the other team has moved the ball quite efficiently all game. There is 10:56 left in the fourth quarter, and you have fourth and goal from the one yard line. A field goal puts you up by eight points; a touchdown probably ices the game. (”Checkmate,” as Urban Meyer would say.) What do you do?

   Scenario 1 – What actually happened: Mike Leach, with his team leading 28-23, called a quarterback sneak on fourth and one that was stopped. His team eventually lost to Houston, 29-28, in the waning seconds. Unsurprisingly, he has taken a lot of heat for not kicking the field goal. Indeed, it looks like he has even recanted, saying, “If I put the field goal team out there, at that point in the game that’s the better thing to do,” Leach said. “And I didn’t do it.” But should he feel bad?

   I’m not so sure. I will say this for certain: if it is the first half, I think we can all absolutely agree that he going for it was the right call. Fourth and one is quite literally almost always worth it from just about anywhere on the field, and especially so on the goal line. The analysis goes something like this, though see the link above for more: Afield goal attempt has an expected value of about 2.5 points (the chance of making it multiplied by three). The value of “going for it” is a bit murkier, but from that part of the field the chance is worth about four points, give or take some of the yardage values. You arrive at this number by taking the chance of success times six, plus the subsequent chance at a good PAT times one, plus factoring in the opponent’s horrible field position if you fail. These numbers are fairly quantifiable, and even if they aren’t to an exact degree we know that four, the expected value of going for it, is higher than two-and-a-half. (Again, people often treat field goals as if they were automatic.)

   The question is whether things change that late in the game, in the fourth quarter. Going back to Urban Meyer, I think that depends on the flow of the game and the type of opponent. And the biggest criterion is whether you think there will be more scoring. My sense is that Leach’s impulse was that eight points was probably not enough to straight win the game at that point (Houston wound up with over 600 yards of offense), though, with perfect knowledge in hindsight, it turns out that it would have been. But these decisions are made ex ante, and it still strikes me as the right one.

   Now a lot of people who are understandably upset, maybe Leach himself, say, “Well, even if I agree with the call to go for it the playcall was bad.” There might be something to this but it strikes me generally as a copout way to say “I just disagree because it didn’t work.” Now the QB sneak itself was pretty ugly, so maybe it could have been practiced better, but it’s not like the team doesn’t work on the sneak or that isn’t the most direct way to convert those plays.

   In any event, I’m curious if there are any comments on the call to go for it. I am looking for real analysis though, not just monday morning quarterbacking. I am legitimately interested in the best way to view these decisions as time begins to get more scarce late in games. I think the data supports the idea that the fourth and one on the one is quite literally always the right call in the first half.