Babb:Numbers back up Haley’s unorthodox calls

[Tribal Warfare]

Numbers back up Haley’s unorthodox calls
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star

It’s a question of common sense and convention, bravery or foolishness. Todd Haley is the Chiefs’ second-year coach, and he’s not afraid to risk his team’s short-term fortunes and long-term future.

Open a game with an onside kick? No problem. Pass up an easy field goal to try for a fourth-down conversion? Bring it on. Haley might not be timid, but one question has grown louder this season: Does he lack the restraint to hold off on impulse and make the decisions that have worked in the NFL for decades?

“As we used to joke in my family,” Haley said this week, “there were box people — we had box people in our family, those were people that were within the box — and we had outside-the-box-people.”

Haley might be unconventional, but he might also not be as reckless as it seems. The Chiefs have attempted nine fourth-down conversions, and four have failed. But a growing culture of coaches and football people now believe that punting on fourth down, in some or even most situations, is a waste; that probabilities prove teams have a higher chance of converting risky plays than most coaches, players and fans are comfortable with.

Brian Burke is a former Navy officer who now spends much of his time compiling odds of success or failure in NFL games. He thinks it’s a smart move to resist both conventional wisdom and the punt. Last Sunday, the Chiefs faced fourth and 3, and Haley opted to pass up a 41-yard field goal that could have given them a two-possession lead in the fourth quarter against Jacksonville. Instead, coaches called a rushing play, and Jamaal Charles was tackled for a 1-yard loss.

Turnover on downs. Momentum lost. Crisis invited.

“After the play,” Chiefs guard Brian Waters said, “you’re kind of like: ‘What’s going on?’ ”

Burke said this week that, according to similar situations in thousands of past situations, Haley made the right call. Burke studied the Chiefs’ situation Sunday — an eight-point lead, 11 minutes, 23 seconds to play, at the Jaguars’ 24 — and said that, before the Chiefs snapped the ball, they held an 88-percent chance of winning. Even if they failed to convert, their chances decreased only to 86 percent, and a field goal would have raised the Chiefs’ chances of winning by only 1 percentage point.

“It was a good call to go for it,” Burke said. “But it was close.”

Burke said that Haley, regardless of perception, is more on the cutting edge than he is on the edge of the insane asylum. Regardless, it’s not for everyone.

“Herm Edwards is the one that told me this,” Waters said, “and it’s something that he thought about, and he never could find himself — I don’t know; how can I say this — he never found himself feeling comfortable to do it.

“Yes, you have to have a pair of nice-sized ones.”

• • •

About 420 miles south and east of Arrowhead Stadium, there’s a coach who has driven his own fans berserk. Kevin Kelley is coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark., and he has punted four times since 2006.

“More as a punishment to our offense than anything,” he said. “I’ve trained them that punting is offensive failure.”

He has been booed by his home crowd and questioned by his assistants and players. But results don’t lie.

Since Kelley took over in 2003, the Bruins — who are 7-1 this season — haven’t missed the playoffs and have won two Class 5A state championships.

Kelley said he has been invited to speak at MIT and has had at least one “well-known NFL coach,” whom he wouldn’t identify, tell him that this is closer to the way the game should be played — but that most coaches worry too much about how they’re viewed.

“That’s what everybody is trained to think,” said Kelley, who says he decided to abandon punting after succeeding with it on a video game. “Just because that’s the way it has always been done, doesn’t mean it’s the best chance to win.”

Pulaski Academy’s method might be excessive — Kelley said his team hasn’t practiced a punt in years — but Burke, the amateur statistician, said that college and NFL coaches might soon distance themselves from the punt, if they can muster the courage.

“Eventually,” he said, “they’ll get more and more bold.”

Burke said that NFL teams, regardless of their strengths, have about a 50-50 chance of converting on fourth and short. He said the Chiefs had a 59-percent chance of converting fourth and 3 last week. It’s also a good move, he said, to occasionally try a surprise onside kick, as the Chiefs did to start the game against Indianapolis.

He added that, if the statistics don’t lie, teams should never attempt a field goal from beyond the 30-yard line, and, most times, coaches should elect to go for it on fourth down most times inside opponents’ territory.

That high school coach down in Arkansas, the man who’s still called foolish sometimes, certainly agrees.

“If nobody had heard of a punt — if nobody ever knew anything different — then, a couple years go by,” Kelley said, “and some guy in Arkansas sent a guy 15 yards deep, snapped it to him, and he kicked it to the other team. They’d be like, ‘What the heck is this guy doing?’ Everybody would think I was a nut.”

• • •

Haley doesn’t much like to talk about this, but he said this week that his aggressiveness isn’t related to impulse.

“It’s not, ‘It’s fourth and this; I think we can get it,’ ” he said. “It’s a little more thought out than that.”

Burke said he can chart, based on field position and situation, the odds of converting a fourth down and the cost-benefit analysis of attempting it. He said it’s doubtful any NFL coach has time to do that, but he said he wouldn’t doubt if a young, firebrand coach such as Haley spends part of his week putting together a similar plan.

After all, early in the drive that ended when the Chiefs attempted that fourth and 3 last week, the coach told quarterback Matt Cassel that it was four-down territory — hardly the signal of an impulse.

“I don’t really question authority,” Cassel said with a smile this week.

Burke said more coaches could begin to follow Haley’s lead in the coming years. He said that the hits registry on his website, AdvancedNFLstats.com, shows visits from several NFL teams’ headquarters, though there has been no activity yet from the Chiefs. Haley wouldn’t reveal much this week, but he didn’t deny that numbers play a role in his decision-making.

“It has a factor in our games,” he said, “so I think that you better be paying attention to and be at least aware of some probability and odds.”

Although Haley might have found a loophole, outsiders are still likely to recoil when the Chiefs pass up points to satisfy the gamblers’ itch that Haley seems to clearly possess.

That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

“Haley is going to win more of these than he loses,” Burke said. “Every now and then, he’s going to get stopped for a 1-yard loss. But more often, over the long run, they’re going to get these. And they’re going to win more games because of this.”

[Hog's Gone Fishin]

i wonder what the statistics say the odds were that Bowe would drop a pass causing us to lose a road game against Indy ?