Measuring Risk in NFL Playcalling
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Benjamin C Alamar
Coaches in the NFL make approximately 1000 offensive play calls during the regular season. These calls are the result of countless hours of preparation and analysis and the coach's own personal experience and each coach has their own measures of success and biases regarding types of play calls. What has not been utilized previously is a systematic analytical approach to measure a play's outcome in relation to the drive, and an evaluation of whether coaches' are irrationally biased in their playcalling. Using play by play data from the 2005 through 2008 NFL regular season, an evaluation system is built around the concept of expected points. Expected points have been used in baseball for over 40 years and have been applied occasionally in football (Romer 2003; Carroll et al 1988). This framework allows for a true calculation of risk for different play types. Risk for passing plays is found to be lower than risk for running plays in certain situations, while still yielding a higher expected value. These results confirm previous analysis (Alamar 2008) that teams underutilize the pass.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Conference Paper
- Predicting Overtime with the Pythagorean Formula
- Using Game Theory to Optimize Performance in a Best-of-N Set Match
- A Spatial Multidimensional Unfolding Choice Model for Examining the Heterogeneous Expressions of Sports Fan Avidity
- Anomalies in Tournament Design: The Madness of March Madness
- Skill Importance in Women's Volleyball
- Quantifying the Effect of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use on Fastball Velocity in Major League Baseball
- A New Iterative Method for Ranking College Football Teams
- Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curves for Measuring the Quality of Decisions in Cricket
- Visualization of Crew Race Performance: Drives and Duels
- Valuations of Soccer Players from Statistical Performance Data
- Measuring Risk in NFL Playcalling
- Using Random Forests and Simulated Annealing to Predict Probabilities of Election to the Baseball Hall of Fame
- The 2009 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports
