Following the 2002 NFL season New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick read a report that would eventually impact even if indirectly, his future assistant, Bill O’Brien. Of course, O’Brien is now Penn State’s head coach.
The paper penned by David Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley was titled ”It’s Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say? A Dynamic Programming Analysis of Football Strategy.”
Within the paper Romer established a basic premise that conventional football wisdom resulted in teams punting too often. Romer analyzed thousands of plays and calculated the likelihood of scoring from any position on the field. From there he was able to gauge the relative worth of the field position gained by punting versus the lost opportunity to score. Romer concluded that coaches punt more than they should.
And Belichick listened.
From there the Patriots employed Harold Sackrowitz, a Rutgers statistician, to work the numbers on the Patriots two-point conversion tactics. Sackrowitz drew the eventual conclusion that the strategy was less than optimal. Subsequently the Patriots decided not to try any two-point conversions the following season.
By the time O’Brien joined the Patriots in 2007 advanced analytics had made its way to the NFL. While baseball had made great leaps in statistical analysis with the invention and application of Bill James’ “Sabermetrics” the NFL was only just beginning to learn how to take data and apply it to game strategy.
Belichick’s renaissance of sorts in New England helped promote the use of such advanced numbers. It didn’t revolutionize the NFL playbook, but it helped change at least in part how NFL coaches and GMs viewed real-time situations on the field.
How did it impact O’Brien?
“I do [put a lot of weight on advanced analytics]” O’Brien said. “I do in certain areas. Percentages on offense as it relates to third down as it relates to our own statistics. We have numbers on redzone statistics, two minute statistics, the other team’s tendencies, and defensive statistics.”
“We have a couple people on our staff who work on that, graduate assistants.”
Anyone who has spent time near the second year head coach knows that he is a quick study and despite his less than bubbly nature, incredibly sharp. There is little doubt that his mind and education was crafted for the art of coaching.
O’Brien spends early mornings and late nights in the office working on his schemes, game plans, and concepts. It’s the only time he says that he can work uninterrupted, joined in the morning only by close friend and strength coach Craig Fitzgerald.
Asked if Penn State fans will see something new this season, or schemes new to college football crafted much like the football chemist minds of Chip Kelly and Mike Leach, he simply, and smartly answers with a “You’ll have to wait and see.”
Like O’Brien, many if not all college football coaches spend countless hours looking at film. On several stops of the Penn State’s Coaches’ Caravan tour O’Brien mentioned that he intends to follow up the tour by breaking down Penn State’s opponents. That’s months before Penn State ever takes the field. Where Penn State’s old staff may have waited months to open the books on a week two opponent, by now O’Brien is already pages deep into what will give Eastern Michigan fits.
Even so, what leads to a decision on the field is not always the same for each coach. Many play it by ear, a game plan in hand but always changing and adjusting to the flow of a game. Others stick to the numbers, playing the team against odds that favor them in any given situation.
Last season, Penn State and O’Brien played the odds on fourth down winning 19 of 34 times. While the choice to go for it may have seemed random, 18 attempts came with the Nittany Lions needing four yards or less to gain a first down. Twenty five of the 34 attempts came when Penn State was either losing or in a one-possession game. Only five attempts ever occurred on Penn State’s side of the field.
How much of that was gut and how much of it was numbers? That’s something O’Brien says is a careful balance between preparation and the way any particular game unfolds.
“You can’t overload yourself with those numbers,” O’Brien said. “What you’re looking for there are tendencies, your own tendencies. I think that it’s important at the beginning of every game to make sure that you aren’t doing the same stuff unless it is bread and butter type stuff. So we use those reports in those types of ways.”
“I would say those tendencies go a lot into play calling and then it’s about how is the game going? Are those tendencies holding up? For example lets take Temple last year on third down they hadn’t pressured that much going into that game so we anticipated that and tried to get five guys out on a route.”
“But then all of a sudden they were bringing the house so we had to keep a couple of guys in to protect, so that’s the kind of thing when you have to change when things aren’t going the way you’d expect.”
Amazingly, while some coaches may use a large card to keep them up to speed with all the little details of the game, O’Brien keeps those tendencies in his head. He has a few people on the sideline to remind him of certain things, but for the most part O’Brien keeps his Brown educated mind fully engaged come kickoff.
“I don’t have a Denny’s card,” O’Brien said smiling as he pretended to hold a large menu out in front of himself.
Judging by how the 2012 season went for Penn State, fans hope O’Brien sticks to the touchdowns and avoids the Grand Slams.
