Football Has Found Its New Bogeyman

An analytics revolution comes for every sport sooner or later. MLB had Moneyball in the early 2000s and has moved well beyond it in the years since. The NBA has used efficiency to all but kill the mid-range jump shot. Soccer has seen an influx of countless new ways to measure passes and scoring chances down to the finest detail.

The NFL’s change became most evident in 2018. Computer models that looked at thousands of games found an inefficiency: Coaches were being too conservative on fourth down, when teams can either punt the ball away or go for an all-or-nothing conversion. That year, they got a little bit braver, attempting fourth-down conversions on 15 percent of their chances, up from 12 percent in the preceding few years. The quants, it seems, won the battle for football’s decision-making soul. In accord with various metrics, NFL teams now more now than before; going into the current season, every NFL front office had , primarily doing