The two-point conversion attempts were all the rage in Kansas City on Monday, and both were indeed against the traditional grain, but there was another coaching decision that had a far greater effect on the game.
Well, it could have had a greater effect on the outcome.
The Chiefs are fortunate it did not.
They stared at fourth-and-3 from the Raiders’ 46-yard line, leading by just one point with 2:36 left in the game.
Their decision? Punt the ball back to the Raiders and leave it up to their defense to determine the outcome.
On the face of it, this might not seem like not a terribly unusual decision, but that says more about NFL bosses’ unwillingness to depart from years of conventional thinking than it does their willingness to follow the math. Or follow even the flow of that very game.
Both suggested the alternative — going for it on fourth down — would be a better option. A significantly far better option. The Chiefs had upwards of a 9.2% better chance of winning the game (per ESPN Analytics) had they left their offense on the field rather than punting the ball back to the Raiders, which offered the visitors a chance for a game-winning drive.
To emphasize once more: yes, the Chiefs won the game with the strategy they elected. The defense got a fourth-down stop to preserve the 30-29 win. It worked. All was well.
But only by a literal toe-tap. If Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams had not ever-so-slightly bobbled a catch that would have placed the Raiders at the 39-yard line with just under a minute to go, this conversation would have and should have been the primary post-game talking point. (And a cameraman probably wouldn’t have made a trip to the hospital after the game, either.)
Which is the point of dissecting it anyway. It’s not the last time the Chiefs will find themselves in similarly tight corners, and we just got yet one more indication of how they might respond.
Against aggression. But more importantly, against the odds.
The crux of picking between two options, after all, is not that you know one side has a guarantee of success and the other side has a guarantee of failure. Rather, you are picking the option most likely to generate success. Here, for example, the win/loss odds were in Chiefs’ favor under both decisions — a punt or a fourth-down try — but they were considerably more in their favor had they gone for it.
The ESPN model gave the Chiefs a 69.1% chance to win with a punt and a 78.3% chance to win by going for it on fourth down.
Which percentage do you prefer?
What’s particularly baffling about this decision is the models are not able to fully account for the flow of the game, and Chiefs coach Andy Reid had that information readily available to him, which should have tilted the scales even more in that direction.
Before that punt on fourth-and-3, the Chiefs had scored on each of their last five possessions. They’d scored touchdowns on three straight. They had little problem moving the ball, in other words, and they were particularly good on third downs, having converted seven of their previous nine attempts. This would have mirrored those third-down play-calls.
Add to that, the Raiders had scored on six of their previous seven possessions before taking over at their own 7.
Yet Reid chose to put his defense on the field for the most critical drive of the game, rather than rolling with his offense.
In most Chiefs games, gimme the offense.
In this one? Patrick Mahomes better not take even one step toward the sideline.
For all of the preparation that goes into a football game, and nobody puts more into that than Reid, it’s just about impossible to find any single thing that will increase your chances of winning by 6-9.2%.
But then one decision pops up late in a game, and you pass on the opportunity.
It didn’t cost the Chiefs a win Monday, because the percentages are not 0 or 100. The wrong choice sometimes works out. The right one sometimes does not.
But the odds are a wrong decision will bite you at some point. The consequences can be the difference between a win and a loss.
