Someday, I predict that “punting” will only be used when you are nursing a lead, with the game late in the 4th quarter. Teams won’t carry a designated punter, they will just assign an athletic player from another position the responsibility.
This will happen at all levels of football. Eventually. But it will take time for the math to win out. Give it 10-15 years.
It took over 30 years (if you judge the starting point as Bill James) for the math to win out in baseball. The math in baseball is more easier and more straight-forward. Way more variables and complexity in football. We might never see an NFL team that passes 95% of the time, never punts, and always onside kicks. The mathematically correct decision in football gets pilloried all the time (like Carrol’s decision at the end of the SB) and all it takes is one loss to set back the whole idea. Football coaches make decisions in the game so as to prevent losing for as long as possible instead of making decisions to win. The Advanced Football Analytics podcast interviewed Coach Kelly a few months ago. Very interesting guy.
I know the easy joke is to make fun of of the sports talk guy making fun of the head coach of my team that has only had one losing season in 9 years as opposed to the craptacular cavalcade of fecal brained coaches your team has had since 2006…six losing seasons out of nine to be exact. But whatever keeps your job going Czabe..the guy took a look at what he did and gave up the playcalling..if they’re worse off because of that, I’m sure you’ll come right back around and say what a stupid move it was…completing the sports talk ouroboros cycle. Sports media types love telling a player, “Hey, you’re not getting paid a lot on that rookie deal” and when the player bombs out a few years later, it becomes “I knew that player wasn’t worth all the money after he signed his extension.”
There are some important facts that have been left out of this video. PA is a high dollar private school in a city where the public HS’s are the worst in the nation, in every measurable statistics. They offer full financial aid packages to students who just happen to be good athletes. In fact, almost every African American student in the school plays football or basketball. So their success statistics are jaded by the fact they have the best athletes on the field, by far, for every game. It’s not being a genius, it’s being a good recruiter.