I love you Tough Tom, but you were wrong on 1st and goal
After the Giants got their final first down last night, setting up first and goal, I tweeted the following:
Twenty years ago, neither team manages the clock correctly in this situation.
I was both right and wrong. The situation was the perfect moment to put the modern advance in sports strategy on display. There was just enough time left to almost run out the clock, given the two Patriots' timeout remaining. The Giants were down exactly two points --- down three and they're trying to score a TD, down one and they're arguably trying to score 8 to get a full touchdown lead. And the defense was being coached by a man who was almost certainly aware of the strategic implications. That it happened in the Super Bowl was almost too good to be true. If both teams had played 1st down perfectly, it would have become the poster-child for the advancement of strategic thinking in football.
As it turns out, the Patriots did play it (almost) perfectly --- they opted to let the Giants score on second down, so they could get the ball back (they probably should have done that on first down, to preserve their other timeout). The Giants, on the other hand, arguably made two mistakes. One was Bradshaw not being able to stop himself on the 1-yard line. The other was the decision to run the ball at all; they could have just knelt on it three times at the seven at kicked a 24 yard field goal with very little time on the clock.
But let me be crystal clear here: with 1:09 left, 1st and goal, down two, opposition with 2 timeouts, it is absolutely correct strategy NOT to score a touchdown. Whether you try to get closer than the 7-yard line is debatable --- it depends on the relative success rate of 24 yard field goals vs. 18 yard field goals, as well as the probability of fumbling in both scenarios --- but you certainly don't want to get in the endzone. The theoretical math is very easy: if you kneel three times, you will be able to kick a field goal with, at most, about 20 seconds left on the clock (and probably less, since the kneel-downs take more time than you think, and can be prolonged). Even if you do run a real play, you absolutely stop on the 1 yard line and do the same thing. If you score the touchdown on first down --- which you will if your opponents are correctly letting you score --- the opposition will be down either 4 or 5 with about a minute to go, with two timeouts. So the question is simple: which is more probable --- missing what amounts to an extra point, or Tom Brady leading a touchdown drive in 1 minute with two timeouts?
It's not even close. You kneel and kick. Or stop on the 1 yard line. League wide, 99.4% of extra points were made this year. The Giants were 45 for 45. You think Brady has less than a 0.6% chance of leading a TD drive with a minute and two timeouts? Not a chance. According to the NFL win probability stat, the Pats had a 4% chance to win when they got the ball back. And they only had 1 timeout as it turned out. And win probability doesn't take into account the individual team, or whether or not you have Tom Brady. Here's the thing: football is a zero-sum game. If Belichek was correct to let the Giants score, then by definition the Giants were wrong to get into the end zone there. And vice-versa. By the above math, the Giants gave the Pats roughly 24-1 odds to win, when they could have made it roughly a 199-1 chance. That's right: by getting in the end zone, the Giants increased their chance of losing roughly eightfold. (This math doesn't include what the Pats could do with 10-15 seconds and no timeouts, down 1, after your field goal and the ensuing kickoff. But that's virtually negligible, especially without a timeout to get the kicker on. They are basically reduced to a hail mary from their own 20. If you want to give them a 1% chance of winning that way, go ahead, it doesn't change the strategy).
After the game, Coughlin admitted he didn't send in the order for Bradsahw to try to stop on the 1-yard line --- that was Eli. Instead, Coughlin said he actually wanted the touchdown there, arguing that no kick is ever guaranteed. Bradsahw said basically the same thing. That's almost the perfect expression of risk-averse coaching, which is a huge problem in the NFL. If you deviate from conventional wisdom --- no matter how much it increases your probability of winning --- and it doesn't work out, you get killed by the media and popular opinion. Consequently, coaches have incentives not to maximize their chances of winning, if doing so has them implementing unconventional strategies that will be criticized (nad possibly get them fired) if they fail. If the Giants had somehow blown a field goal and lost the Super Bowl after Bradshaw knelt on the one, Coughlin would have been (incorrectly) buried by the media. But if they score the TD and then the Pats come back and win, that would have been (wrongly) seen as not quite so bad: we did everything we could, but they beat us.
It's horrible logic, but it still holds in popular perception. Let me repeat: the Giants hurt their chances of winning last night by scoring that TD; the actual outcome doesn't matter when evaluating the strategic decision. But perhaps the conventional wisdom about these things will not hold for much longer. Last night definitely exemplified how dangerous the traditional decision can be, and there's actually a debate going on today in the popular press that leans toward kneeling and kicking. Twenty years ago, that debate would not even have existed; no one would have dared even consider not getting the TD.