There’s one easy area to point to as a criticism of Dennis Allen’s first year as New Orleans Saints head coach: a lack of aggression on fourth downs. No offense attempted fewer fourth-down conversions than Allen’s offense last year (11). Whether he trusted his defense too much or didn’t trust his quarterbacks enough, Allen chose to kick the ball away whenever given the opportunity.
But this lack of aggression went under the microscope in an article from Football Outsiders analyst Aaron Schatz, who used FO’s Aggressiveness Index to rank every decision-maker from around the NFL. This tool has been in use since 2006, which Schatz describes as: “The goal was to find a way to rank coaches based on their tendencies on fourth downs in a manner that was easy to understand but accounted for the different rates at which the average coach will choose to ‘go for it’ in different situations.”
