Going for it on 4th down is like flipping. If they miss it, they are most certainly going to lose. If they make it, they will certainly win. Flipping is fine if you think you are going to have a disadvantage otherwise. However, Pats would have been heavy favorites to stop Colts from driving the length of the field for a TD, and that is why this is a bad move.

so you think the colts score from the 30 100% of the time but score from their own 35 less than 50% of the time? hmmm

Hey I get my gamble on like everyone else, but uhhh...I'm all about having more outs, ya know?


Poker Player's Analysis > Rocket Scientist's Analysis of this 4th and 1 dilemma

That analysis cracks me up. Most people who say punt claim Peyton will drive it in for a TD an overwhelming % of the time from the 30 yet for some reason this doesn't apply if you punt and he has to go 30-40 more yards on top of that. Of course their logic is that Peyton scored on the drive in the game so the odds are 100% from there but the Colts only score say 35% from some other distance. Que?

tAaZoIT says to choose arguments with idiots

I love how so many people act like they have the divine answer to this question based on stats provided by some randomNFLsite.com like their stats are the sole authority that analyzed this situation perfectly.

A long history of failure continues. Are you really arguing a Phone Booth-esque position?

A long history of insulting based on false assumptions continues.

I think you pretty well humiliated yourself the last time you spoke of Bayesian probability in a thread like this, but far be it from me to deprive a man of the rope with which to hang himself.

So... What are you using to substantiate your opinion?

A lot of big words?

I'm sure tuq will get confused here at some point and ban me for trolling.

But really man?

To elaborate, I don't know nor care what this post means, although if I researched it I know the concepts would be completely elementary to me. All I was referring to was I have seen over 30 different sources quoted as the absolute truth since this play happened, and there are way too many variables involved for all of them to be accurate, or even for any single source to be completely correct.

The language was pretty rudimentary sans one word, which you should be familiar with considering the fact you ridiculed my probabilities previously, while also being absurdly incorrect.

But back to the topic at hand. Are you saying that the decision isn't correct and it could possibly be correct to punt... Or are you saying that the probabilities are not exact?

Both are loltarded for opposite reasons, though equally obvious.

I don't remember ever ridiculing your probabilities, but give you the benefit of the doubt on that.

I don't have an opinion on the play right now, I just came in to comment at how LOL it is that people are so ready to quote sources from some random.com as absolute fact without doing any research themselves. I'm not accusing you or anyone else of doing this, I've just seen so many different sources thrown out by so many different people, that's all I meant.

I haven't read this whole thread. but you guys DO realize that most sportscasters just mindlessly read whatever is on the teleprompter, right? That just because someone says they don't agree with Belichick doesn't necessarily mean they actually don't agree with it?

Come on, you don't really expect me to believe that Trent Dilfer can read that smoothly without stuttering?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=4394

When you spout off all the obvious trollz and outright lies that you do... I can understand how its difficult to keep track of what you say.

So you really don't know if its absolute fact or not, nor are you able to form an opinion of such research. Instead you seem to suggest that it cannot be correct purely because its from a website. Furthermore, you state that no one is actually doing this... so wtf are you actually posting about?

Need more rope?

the formula that tells us whether or not the decision was correct is simple, obvious and indisputable. there is no need to quote any website.

the probabilities we plug into the formula are high-liklihood-of-error estimates. there are many variables and any one guess by anyone or any website could be significantly wrong. however, there is no reasonable set of estimates i have seen or can imagine that would lead to the conclusion that punting is correct. there is that much room for error.

in fact, most of the estimates given by those who favor punting suggest that going for it is correct by a long ways.

and besides, even if the actual probabilities were so drastically different from the norm that punting was correct, in order to criticize BB we have to assume that he should have known that.

how can we possibly know that they were that far off the norm and assume that BB should have known this when we ourselves admit such a high liklihood of error?

when you criticize him you either a) are saying that you knew something BB didn't know about the pats situation being drastically different from similar historical situations or b)you make no sense.

i'm pretty sure most of the TV idiots fall under b. i would respect you more if you tried to argue a, despite it seeming incredibly far-fetched.

I hate beating a dead horse, but one thing that was incorrectly addressed repeatedly was the handling of the play between 3rd and 4th down. Belichick clearly states that they already made the decision to go on 4th, but that a "miscommunication" resulted in the punt team starting onto the field, which subsequently caused the offense to run off the field. I interpret this as "somebody ****ed up and assumed we were punting."

See 7:10 in this interview.

A coinflip? How about this. You and I have a gunfight. We each shoot one bullet at a time, and if we hit, it is fatal. We take turns until one of us is dead.

I'll give you way better than coin-flip odds. My accuracy is only 45%, and yours is 60%. You have way better odds.

I get to go first........... you still like your 60% versus my 45%?

To me, the problem with using percentages in these situations to identify an optimal outcome is that in football, sample sizes are too small for coaches to utilize these decisions often enough to prove themselves as "long term" winners. You only play 16 games a season in the NFL, and each game is crucial. This call came as a result of a perfect storm of conditions - a game on the line against a long-time rival, a HoF opposing QB who has eaten up your defense in the 4th qtr, and a head coach with arguably the most job stability in the league and hence the leeway to try something like that.

To anyone saying this was a watershed moment in enlightening coaches on 4th down strategy, you won't see any change in coache's strategy in the NFL, at least anytime soon. We won't see a playcall like that again for a while.

But they are using percentages in their head anyway - they just aren't calculating them right.

And the only people they would "look better" to by using the wrong percentages are people who also use the wrong percentages.

It's hilarious that I'm being compared to best-selling authors as some kind of an insult. Either way, I think his point was that Taleb's book contradicts what I was saying. Our viewpoints couldn't be further apart. Taleb is always talking about how everyone is doing it all wrong - I'm talking about how everyone is doing it all right. He's generally right when he's talking about the unknowability of things, but appears completely oblivious about the fact that decisions have to be made. Taleb largely bases his arguments on the fact that people say stupid stuff. And on tasks that our intuition isn't trained for, we do stupid stuff. But human competence can't be judged by human communication alone. There's no reason for our beliefs or statements to be correct - what does correctness even mean? - they merely need to facilitate advantageous behavior. Nor can human competence be judged by our incompetence at tasks that we haven't learned how to perform.

It's interesting, then, that most of you are jeering at the "incorrectness" of journalists, casual fans, etc, as though that is the criteria by which human communication is judged, yet when questioned, are willing to acknowledge that you don't care about correctness - what matters to you are whether people are being nice to you, whether people are framing things in ways you can understand (willie25), whether engaging in this particular conversation is EV (Thremp), whether the conversation is entertaining - in short, the metrics by which conventional sports bar talk is largely superior to the sports statnerd analysis you worship. When outnerded, you're just as likely as the sports bar drunk to want to change the context away from discussion about correctness.

Thremp - because he's so transparently self-conscious - demonstrates this well. When he notices people who are wrong in ways that enable him to tell them how wrong they are (so that he can pwn or whatever), the argument is about correctness. When this isn't possible, either due to his limited rhetorical skills, poor initial argument, etc (he enjoys "pwning" far too much for this to ever be a matter of motivation), he whines about everything else, as though the correctness of his statement is immaterial at this point. If I'm wrong about this, what explains the harshness on Steven Segal's Dad and Shoe?

I agree that most things I write here are trivially true - it's just that a lot of people are emotionally averse to them. This is true of nearly any wisdom - it's obvious if you look at it from the right angle or its applicability in situations that don't involve your emotions. The rest of what you wrote is garbled nonsense - it doesn't make any sense to adhere rigorously to statements (statements are not rules or methodologies; strict adherence makes you dogmatic) and trivially true things are trivially true because they don't need much justification. Calling someone's arguments both trivially true and insufficiently justified is like calling a girl a fat, anorexic twig.