Dean you wanna co-own a NBA team and make hbob our GM?

Rangzzzz

I'm open to the possibility that there are other factors I'm not fully taking into consideration. However, I think you're alone if you're suggesting that NFL coaches, on average, don't suck at these types of decisions. As such, the onus would be on you to demonstrate why.

Wow this is amazing

I do think it's interesting that in a forum that loves the efficient markets hypothesis (i.e. the sanctity of closing lines as the most powerful form of knowledge about the game) there seems to be such widespread agreement that the market for NFL coaches is so hugely inefficient.

actually, I have never suggested this. I have merely stated that you have no proof that it is actually the case. I also believe that the view you and other people are considering re: 4th down decisions is not held by the majority of people in a lot of cases. I believe that there are decisions where the chart would say to go for it and easily 75% of coaches and football fans with knowledge of the sport would disagree with the chart.

Just because you agree with the chart without even having to look does not mean the opposite viewpoint is the minority. Thus, I think you would have to prove, through a mathematical analysis that does not involve backtesting or historical data, that your point is correct in the current landscape of the NFL rather than merely implying that certain decisions that NFL coaches routinely "suck at" these decisions. You can't do this through a reliance on stale data and a backtesting methodology that is known to have flaws and biases. I fully admit that I do not know of a way to improve this methodology (or I would have done so already or brought up some central tenents to help others improve on it), but I have never seen proof of anything you or others are suggesting as facts. You can't, in good faith, frame something as a fact when all you have is suggestive evidence.

And before you or anyone else accuses me of relying on a semantic argument that is essentially all this thread is since it is based on presmises of already being hired, being able to outsource central parts to the current role of a HC, and taking a role that would generally be a minor staff position and renaming it while giving yourself the power to hire and fire staff with a seemingly unconstrained budget.

team schedule

looks like he's 2-1-3 (9pts) in league play so far and won the first game of their country's tournament.

oh, the old manager was 1-2-7 (10pts), so the new guy got more wins in 3 weeks than the old guy did in 10.

BobboFitos ITT imo

We view certain markets as efficient because those who impact the markets are judged/rewarded 100% by their ability(in the long term, obviously theres short term luck). In other words, the fact that Haralalalalalabob has been able to both make a profit and have a winning record against closing lines(I'm assuming this part but I think its a fair assumption) is proof of his abilities. NFL coaches, meanwhile, achieve success when the team achieves success, and its patently obvious that team success may exist independent of good coaching.

I don't really see what you're arguing. Most everyone here(if not everybody) accepts the notion that many NFL coaches suck at these types of decisions. You may be correct that I/we can't prove it in an absolute sense.

I thought that it was so widely accepted here that NFL coaches suck at these decisions that it could be a premise of my argument, not needing further proof.

Surely a point in our favor right? You'd prefer mindless, slavish devotion to a concept in the face of all reason?

That evaluating coaches is noisy is a reasonable point; of course, it also argues against the idea that one can easily say how crappy these coaches are.

Arguing for the supremacy of the right sort of groupthink doesn't seem like the best evidence for your side either.

in the past there were societies that had a widespread belief that the world was not round. some people used this as a premise of their argument that if you were to travel in one direction on the earth's surface you would never be able to return to the same point without reversing course. this is obviously not the case as people have done so since then. just because there is a widely accepted belief does not mean that conclusions that are logically drawn on the basis of this premise are, in fact, true. your conclusions either need substantial proof or your premises have to be based in fact and have conclusions that are logically drawn in order for your argument to have weight.

agreed. I'm not arguing that its the best or even good evidence. I'm explaining why I didn't think it worthwhile to spend time providing evidence for it- if everyone here already agrees on something, then why waste more time debating it? I think my OP was long enough as is, I didn't see the need to make it even bigger by providing evidence for something that all(or ~99%) of 2p2ers already believe.

The argument is that it should give you some pause in saying "holy **** these guys suck so bad because I has a model." I'm just unimpressed with what I've seen of football methodology in particular, thus I don't take the models very seriously. I don't doubt that there are some situations where almost any reasonable model will disagree with NFL head coaching wisdom, and thus that there are some errors out there. But it's also not clear to me how much equity you'd gain by swapping out a coach of your choosing and dropping in the 1-year-of-study hypothesized 2+2er - my suspicion is you'd lose a ton.

people dont always believe in things on a rational basis and often hold incorrect beliefs. If you want a current example then you can google search for news of the world ending and find many people who thought that it would already be over by now or at least will end in the coming 24 hours. We will know by tomorrow if this widely held, but not majority, viewpoint is correct.

Do you have any clue how hard this is? See: book describing Shanahan and his rotating door of punters.

another point against the 2p2er as coach argument is age. Do you really think your 2p2er that is less than 30 years old will never be overruled by players or other, older and more experienced, coaches overriding their decisions? I only cited the under 30 crowd because the over 30 crowd doesn't seem to think they could coach better than current coaches and I don't think a guy like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning is going to respond too well when you try to overrule them on a playcall. Also, good luck handling the QB situation on the Jets or something similar without the respect of the players who are your age and probably still consider the math minded, rational guy his age as beneath him.

some more thoughts i held over...

The biggest difference between coaching a sports team and poker, in this regard, are twofold:

1)Online poker allowed people to gain experience at an exponentially faster rate than the live pros before them did. No such thing exists for any sport right now. There's no way for you to coach 25 seasons-- that includes offseasons as well-- in a single year.

2)There's nothing that adequately simulates the experience for the independent operator. Poker is egalitarian-- anyone with the money can sit at the table and gain experience. Coaching positions are much more finite. Perhaps eventually some sort of computer simulation can effectively model all aspects of coaching, say, a football team, but that seems far away. Even if a game like Madden manages to replicate the on-field decisions, that leaves out practices, designing playbooks and strategy, gameplanning, interacting with the players, ownership, and front office, and much more.

I mean, I think anyone who's smart enough in the ways necessary can learn anything. But as long as it's impossible to test this hypothesis, supposing you can is just intellectual narcissism. I mean, take Assani-- he seems to have a ton of free time right now and not really need the money. Why not try to get a job on some staff somewhere, even if it's volunteer assistant at a high school? Why not get some experience on what the endeavor might be like, and report back as to how it's changed your perception of the possibility?

I looked up this guy because I thought he would be the best counterargument that a 2p2er could be a head coach, but it turned out he was a football coach before he became a CEO. Alas. It also turned out that someone else posted this already.

What about your experience is applicable to knowledge of what NFL coaches actually do? What makes you credible when you say other people's knowledge isn't applicable, and then go on to describe what you think an NFL head coach's job is?

This is a totally reasonable reason for someone to not want to enter coaching, but once they accept this, they should probably stop starting conversations every few weeks about how great they'd be at it.

And finally, I agree with these:

CDL,

Conventional wisdom being wrong(particularly when its obviously due to lack of complete information such as believing the world is flat) in the past is not good reason to doubt conventional wisdom of today(particularly when its something in which we have large data sets and access to a ton of information).


I mean, you would agree that if you're down by 8 points with 10 seconds left in the game and you score a touchdown that you should go for 2, right? Everyone would agree with this. Its 100% "conventional wisdom." People being wrong about the world being flat doesn't mean we should doubt it.

2p2ers would be too lazy to put in lots of hours a day

for the record, I don't think this matters, but since its been brought up a few times- I'm a part of the over 30 crowd

Has anyone created an SE league for Madden/NCAA/whatever NBA games? Think it would be a good way to see who's the cream of the crop wrt strategy.

Well, on the one hand, tongue firmly in cheek on this post. On the other hand, just because the real bar debates are much worse doesn't mean Assani isn't overestimating his competency here as a matter of ego.

While I think those are good points, in my opinion the biggest difference between poker and football/basketball in terms of amenability to quantitative analysis is that it's already very clear what the variables you should be looking at in poker are. Although there's a lot of room for complexity, the underlying framework is quite simple. I think people aren't even at the point where they're sure what they should be looking at in team sports. I imagine the situation will improve with time, but there's a big difference between being able to operate skillfully in a well-defined paradigm and being able to identify the most important variables and quantitatively capture them accurately enough to be useful.

EDIT: to forestall an anticipated line of argument, I'm sure somebody will say that 10-20 years ago it was not clear what variables people should be looking at in poker. While obviously the practice of the game was quite a bit different, from the perspective of mathematical analysis I think it was already clear what had to be done. Once people decided to start thinking about the game quantitatively, what was important was obvious and easily quantified. That is what I perceive as the important difference here.

past data is not a perfect, or necessarily even a decent, approximation of the current landscape.

do you think any current head coach would not go for 2 here? I would obviously go for 2, but think every current coach would also. the spots where you think a 2p2er could improve over a current coach are not such clear cut spots.