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4 & 2 analytics

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    • 09/13/2021 at 9:30 AM #150388
      13
      AllInUteFan
      Participant

      “analytics…had it as a solid go 4 or less, we were at 2 and I thought that was the play” – Whit

      Whenever I hear football coaches talk analytics I cringe. I trust analytics when done properly, I’ve created and trained analytics teams with clients for years. I don’t trust football coaches using analytics for lots of reasons, but here are two.

      First – most statistics being sold to athletic orgs are based on Bayesian models. Fully developed models include 3 parts (renamed by me for simplicity) – historical data, likelihood and summary. The top result of most of these models is overconfidence. Bayesian statistics is notoriously bad at handling real-world situations with complex (unpredictable) situations.

      Second – the summary is highly influenced by historical data, for which there is basically none in this situation. Weber St and Arizona aren’t acceptable proxies for either current team and the sample size is too small. I assume the model contains data from previous seasons to add “credibility” to the analysis. If so, that’s criminal. Bottom line, there is no applicable data for that situation outside of the situational data – 4&2, down 3 points, late in 2nd quarter, playing on the road against amped up rival. That’s it.

      The last major cringe is Whit’s follow up line: “just because it was a bad outcome doesn’t mean it was a bad decision.” That’s the marketing line for the analytics firms that sell these services. A decision based on a faulty data set is a faulty decision. 

       

    • 09/13/2021 at 9:55 AM #150389
      3
      Utesbyfive
      Participant

      Write him a letter. Seriously.

      • 09/13/2021 at 10:51 AM #150396
        3
        Ute Dub
        Participant

        Coach Whitt goes by the analytics every time. Opposing teams: Great! We know exactly how to beat him.  Coach Whitt needs to play chess with some guys that know how to think more than one move ahead.

    • 09/13/2021 at 9:58 AM #150391
      4
      AZUteFan
      Participant

      Great post! Analytics should be used as a tool, but not primary source to base all decisions. And for KW to hide behind analytics is surprising for an experienced coach. Would rather hear that he had confidence in his offense or that they saw something in the defense they thought they could exploit. But to blame it on the analytics is a cop out.

      For the record, I love KW and all he has done for this program and no, not calling for him to be fired. Just stating my concern about his analytics mindset. 

    • 09/13/2021 at 10:52 AM #150398
      4
      PlainsUte
      Participant

      In my field we deal with probability a lot.  If something is highly probable, but doesn’t happen, it doesn’t disprove the probability; it doesn’t make it a bad decision.  You can’t judge probabilities on one outcome.  There is a book by a famous poker player that goes into it a lot, look up “Thinking in Bets”.

      That said they, need to call a better play as their go-to on 4th and short or 3rd and short.  Going into shotgun for a hand-off up the middle seems stupid to me.   Now if you faked the handoff and did a bootleg or something, I’m up for that.

    • 09/13/2021 at 12:43 PM #150415
      dleto
      Participant

      I was going to write something similar, you said it better than I would have though.  

      I was essentially going to say that analytics/probabilty can tell you that, in general, in a certain situation, what is more likely to happen.  But as you point out, every specific situation needs to be judged on its own merits.  Personally, I still like the decision to go for it.  I think scoring there would have been a huge momentum shift.  But the play call was atrocious.  The specifics of the situation called for a different response.  We couldn’t do something similar against Weber St., the offensive line showed no sign of dominance.  Relying purely on power football in that situation (then inexplicably using the shotgun), made no sense at all.  Whitt’s excuse of “someone missed an assignment” was also a ridiculous excuse because as all data pointed to up to that point, the probability of someone missing an assignment was pretty high.  

      I like some of what analytics has done to the game because it challenges long held beliefs that aren’t backed up by actual data.  But it does really sounds like Whitt doesn’t understand the limitations of analytics and hiding behind them when he fails is disappointing.

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