Shockingly Obvious: McDaniels, Don't Be Afraid of the Run!!!

[Deus Irae]

They were never behind by more than 10 points in the Jets loss, the Bengals loss, the Panthers loss nor the Dolphins loss.

The passing game for the 203 Patriots is not more than 2 times better than the running game.

In each of those 4 losses, they forced the square peg.



In each of those

The Patriots have gone 51-13 (winning percentate: 80%) over the past 4 seasons playing the way they play, yet you think the magic bullet is to run more, and you point to some of the most ridiculous examples possible.




Your lack of understanding on this topic is astounding.

 

[BradyFTW!]

The Patriots have gone 51-13 (winning percentate: 80%) over the past 4 seasons playing the way they play, yet you think the magic bullet is to run more, and you point to some of the most ridiculous examples possible.




Your lack of understanding on this topic is astounding.

Appeals to authority are always pretty lame, but it's especially rich when it comes from Deus. Next time you're inclined to criticize the personnel decisions, just remember that all criticism is rendered invalid by their winning percentage.

 

[BradyBranch39]

Lets not let Mr. Brady off the hook. He's changing up some plays and going with passes when a run was originally called.

He's also changing some passes to runs.

 

[Bobsyouruncle]

They were never behind by more than 10 points in the Jets loss, the Bengals loss, the Panthers loss nor the Dolphins loss.

The passing game for the 203 Patriots is not more than 2 times better than the running game.

In each of those 4 losses, they forced the square peg.



In each of those

It doesn't matter how many points they're down, it matters that they're down late. Would you run the ball down 10 points with 3:30 left? That's basically what your saying, had they kept a fairly equal split of run/pass they would have won. It's clearly not true, they got two more possessions in CIN because they only passed. had they run they would have just ended the game earlier, same as in CLE.

How do you explain the 2003 SB win with 48 passes and 35 runs?

If your going to prove some run/pass causation and say it has nothing to do with the situation at the end of the game then look at the numbers through the first 3 quarters. You'll see there is no causation between winning and running the ball more, it's simply a result of the situation at the end.

That's the case for every team in every win or loss. Run heavier in wins (usually), pass heavier in losses (usually). But that isn't some amazing secret you've uncovered. There's a reason why today, and for the past 30 years or so NFL coaches keep "making this same mistake." If all you had to do was just run more to win they would do it, but everybody knows it's simply not true.

 

[Deus Irae]

Appeals to authority are always pretty lame, but it's especially rich when it comes from Deus. Next time you're inclined to criticize the personnel decisions, just remember that all criticism is rendered invalid by their winning percentage.

There's no appeal to authority there. There's pointing out that the current system works at an 80% clip, in direct response to someone complaining about the current system.

I don't suggest the Patriots get rid of Belichick (and I call him the G.O.A.T. as a coach) so, just as in yesterday's game thread, you're talking out of your backside when you try turning this around on me.

In the Jets game, Brady's pick-6 was not because of a passing imbalance, and the Patriots were in the lead 21-10 when it happened.

Also, the Patriots and Panthers losses involved bad/unprecedented, penalty calls which skewed the final results.

Again, correlation is not causation. You used to understand that.

 

[supafly]

Browns in 2010 has to be up there too, and I'd include the 2009 playoff loss to the Ravens, but they've definitely been few and far between.

Yes, those are definitely 2 more that I had forgotten about, or more likely blocked from my memory bank

I don't think that it's necessarily fair to place blame anywhere, particularly on JMcD, but that's just my opinion. It just seems to be something where the old "it is what it is" thought comes into play.

One of the more glaring examples was being up 23-10 at Seattle last year, with about 6 minutes left, yet they still put the ball in the air a ton of times. In examples like that, it was strictly gameplanning and/or attempting to avoid the strength of the opponent's run defense.

However, there are indeed plenty of times where the balance has been off for one reason or another, so I think it's fair to question that as a fan. At the same time I'd be somewhat leery of putting blame in a certain direction, but that's just me.

 

[Bobsyouruncle]

Teams are only forced to pass when they're down by multiple scores late in the game. How many times did the Pats find themselves in that situation this year? There were handful of times when they were attempting to come from behind on the last drive where they were pretty much forced to abandon the run, but when it happened it was rarely for more than a single drive, and in most games it never happened at all. Every loss was by a touchdown or less, and the only time that it took a huge comeback over >1 drive to get to within one score was the Denver game.

This is absolutely untrue. Even if down 1 point with less than 2 minutes you would go to the pass. Or for an even better example go to the 2001 SB. They weren't even down, it was a tie game and they called 9 straight pass plays to get in FG range. Would you have taken Madden's advice and play for overtime? It would have made for a better run/pass percentage.

 

[shmessy]

The Patriots have gone 51-13 (winning percentate: 80%) over the past 4 seasons playing the way they play, yet you think the magic bullet is to run more, and you point to some of the most ridiculous examples possible.




Your lack of understanding on this topic is astounding.

This is 2013.

Sorry to break the news to you, but Gronkowski and Hernandez are not on the field and 3 of their 5 WR's are rookies.

Who knew? Everyone here but you, evidently.

Not surprising that you are so blind to this. After all, yesterday, you were the guy who wanted the Pats to use the 5 wide with Vereen spilt out on a torrentially rainy day!

http://www.patsfans.com/new-england...philbin-brain-freeze-buffalo.html#post3700955

Post #13:
"Five wide, empty backfield
Four wide + Vereen"

Post #27:
"Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?
Gotta love this place...."

Then the game happened.....

And the Brady's one interception was because Vereen couldn't handle a slippery pass. The running game destroyed the Bills.

But, amazingly, you kept pitching!

In response to JMC00's post #28 "Today it was" response to your ""Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?

You answered with one of your comedy classic "No it wasn't" answers in post #29.

Bobsyouruncle made a good argument counter to my point. It was factual and had substance to it. I don't fully agree with it, but can respect it and can learn from it.

You are just writing graffiti for the sake of argument.

 

[TyronePoole]

The OP is wrong, the Pats actually don't pass enough and have run too much throughout the season. I'll leave this here with some segments cut out on the off chance that someone actually reads and tries to better their understanding of Game Theory optimal playcalling:


Advanced NFL Stats: Game Theory and Run/Pass Balance

The best approach is to unpredictably sometimes run and sometimes pass, which game theory calls a mixed strategy. This is also what we see in reality. In fact, game theory methods can actually "solve" the game, providing the optimum proportion of running and passing. The solution is what's known as a Nash equilibrium, named after the mathematician made famous by the movie A Beautiful Mind. The Nash equilibrium is the mix of strategies where each opponent, knowing the strategies of the other, has nothing to gain by changing his own strategy. In other words, an offense is choosing the best proportion of play calls taking into account the defense's strategy mix, and the defense is choosing its best proportion of strategies knowing the offense's strategy mix.


On the football field, the equilibrium point is found by trial and error. Countless plays are recorded and remembered along with corresponding opponent tendencies. Coaches tend to find the optimum mix of plays subjectively based on a combination of experience, intuition, and tradition. Game theory, however, can provide the true optimum mix of strategies, assuming the strategy choices are clear and their outcome distributions are known.

Even though the example here is artificial, the principles of game theory apply throughout every football game. Of course, offenses aren't limited to two play choices. Their playbooks are famously complex. And defenses are not limited to three options. In fact, they're not limited to any number. In reality a defense has an infinite continuum of biases between run and pass, from goal line defense to prevent defense and everything in between.


These problems are really only a matter of scale. The algorithms of game theory can solve games with large numbers of strategy options. It can even handle strategy sets like a defense's, without discrete "pure" strategies. Plus, the problem lends itself to great simplification because much of every offense's playbook is composed of subtle variations of a few virtually universal NFL plays.


Application of game theory hinges on true measures of utility. The real difficulty in applying game theory to football on a practical level would be to develop a valid measure of the preferences of the various payoffs in the game matrix. Yards or points would seem like suitable measures, but a 3-yard gain is far more useful on 3rd and 2 than on 3rd and 9. And a 3-point field goal is fairly useless down by 7 late in the 4th quarter. In a forthcoming article I'll attempt to solve this problem with a proposed utility function for football.

Basically, to reach Nash Equilibrium, the output of both run plays and pass plays should be equally efficient. An imbalance in this number means defenses are having greater success against one side by overcompensating, and you are under-exploiting this imbalance by failing to reciprocate.

The Pats were 20th in the league in Run EPA (Expected points Added) at -5.4 and 19th in EPA/P (expected points added per play) at -.01. Conversely, they were 4th in the league in Pass EPA at 96.6 and 7th in pass EPA/P at .14.

That means that on average, defenses were overcompensating for the run against the pats and the Pats failed to exploit it. A balanced offense according to Nash Equilibrium would have seen these number equalize to where the output is roughly the same in EPA and EPA/P. The Pats ran the ball way too much and it was wildly inefficient. Many teams are in the same boat however.

 

[shmessy]

How do you explain the 2003 SB win with 48 passes and 35 runs?

Bob, that's LESS than 2-1.

That's my point.

 

[Shockt327]

Ugh. This is the oldest cliche in the book. Teams run the ball when they already have the lead. Teams pass more when playing from behind. Correlation =/= causation.

 

[shmessy]

The OP is wrong, the Pats actually don't pass enough and have run too much throughout the season. I'll leave this here with some segments cut out on the off chance that someone actually reads and tries to better their understanding of Game Theory optimal playcalling:


Advanced NFL Stats: Game Theory and Run/Pass Balance





Basically, to reach Nash Equilibrium, the output of both run plays and pass plays should be equally efficient. An imbalance in this number means defenses are having greater success against one side by overcompensating, and you are under-exploiting this imbalance by failing to reciprocate.

The Pats were 20th in the league in Run EPA (Expected points Added) at -5.4 and 19th in EPA/P (expected points added per play) at -.01. Conversely, they were 4th in the league in Pass EPA at 96.6 and 7th in pass EPA/P at .14.

That means that on average, defenses were overcompensating for the run against the pats and the Pats failed to exploit it. A balanced offense according to Nash Equilibrium would have seen these number equalize to where the output is roughly the same in EPA and EPA/P. The Pats ran the ball way too much and it was wildly inefficient. Many teams are in the same boat however.

Does this Nash Equilibrium know that our TE's now are named Hoomanawanui and Mulligan, or that 3 of our 5 WR's are untested rookies?

 

[TyronePoole]

Does this Nash Equilibrium take personnel into account?

This is like asking how long is a piece of string. If your offensive efficiency is greater when passing than when running by a non-trivial margin Nash Equilibrium tells us you are not playing the game optimally regardless of personnel.

 

[Joker]

Look..I was AT the Miami game in Florida...I don't know about any equilibriums but we had a drive in the 4th quarter where we ran the ball down their throats and then we reach their thirty and the "genius" calls three friggin' pass plays...he does this all the freakin' time as noted every week by the members complaints in thread after thread.

A lot of times we fans get too emotionally invested in one style over another and see things that aren't really there but as far as HIS play calling goes, I would hazard a guess that the preponderance of Patriot fans have more than a little aggravation at his calls in the red zone.

 

[RayClay]

This is like asking how long is a piece of string. If your offensive efficiency is greater when passing than when running by a non-trivial margin Nash Equilibrium tells us you are not playing the game optimally regardless of personnel.

Incredible that someone would spend that much time without taking into account how the game is actually played. Sure the "average" pass play gains more than the "average" run, but teams don't get any credit for the "average" amount of yards they gain.

Teams have to either score or get first downs or they turn the ball over. A twenty yard pass gets one first down, but followed by three incompletions you have to punt.

Get 3 or 4 yds a carry consistently, you get only 12-16 yards every four downs, but gain first downs endlessly.

You obviously, by the same logic, put yourself in 2nd and 6, 3rd and 2 etc., never in 3rd and ten.

Since football is a game with it's own incentives, I can't understand why these stats people keep trying to force it into analyses that don't fit it's strategies.

 

[RayClay]

This is 2013.

Sorry to break the news to you, but Gronkowski and Hernandez are not on the field and 3 of their 5 WR's are rookies.

Who knew? Everyone here but you, evidently.

Not surprising that you are so blind to this. After all, yesterday, you were the guy who wanted the Pats to use the 5 wide with Vereen spilt out on a torrentially rainy day!

http://www.patsfans.com/new-england...philbin-brain-freeze-buffalo.html#post3700955

Post #13:
"Five wide, empty backfield
Four wide + Vereen"

Post #27:
"Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?
Gotta love this place...."

Then the game happened.....

And the Brady's one interception was because Vereen couldn't handle a slippery pass. The running game destroyed the Bills.

But, amazingly, you kept pitching!

In response to JMC00's post #28 "Today it was" response to your ""Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?

You answered with one of your comedy classic "No it wasn't" answers in post #29.

Bobsyouruncle made a good argument counter to my point. It was factual and had substance to it. I don't fully agree with it, but can respect it and can learn from it.

You are just writing graffiti for the sake of argument.

I've always been for a strong running attack and more balance, but I think you're off base talking about the early games. By Cinci, and earlier, the league knew we had no helthy receivers that could run patterns and hold on to the ball, therefore they were undoubtedly jamming the middle. Brady had to force the ball until someone caught it and commanded some respect fron the defense.

Edelman didn't all of a sudden go from a marginal player to 100 catches, he was going to get thrown to until they could loosen up that D and get the kids off (even if he had to hurt their feelings lol).

 

[unoriginal]

It doesn't matter how many points they're down, it matters that they're down late. Would you run the ball down 10 points with 3:30 left? That's basically what your saying, had they kept a fairly equal split of run/pass they would have won. It's clearly not true, they got two more possessions in CIN because they only passed. had they run they would have just ended the game earlier, same as in CLE.

How do you explain the 2003 SB win with 48 passes and 35 runs?

If your going to prove some run/pass causation and say it has nothing to do with the situation at the end of the game then look at the numbers through the first 3 quarters. You'll see there is no causation between winning and running the ball more, it's simply a result of the situation at the end.

That's the case for every team in every win or loss. Run heavier in wins (usually), pass heavier in losses (usually). But that isn't some amazing secret you've uncovered. There's a reason why today, and for the past 30 years or so NFL coaches keep "making this same mistake." If all you had to do was just run more to win they would do it, but everybody knows it's simply not true.

Sir, I believe first and foremost we must set an example for the children, that it is better to lose four games the right way, then to win one of four the wrong way, and therefore we must preserve the proper run/pass ratio regardless of the clock.

 

[TyronePoole]

Incredible that someone would spend that much time without taking into account how the game is actually played. Sure the "average" pass play gains more than the "average" run, but teams don't get any credit for the "average" amount of yards they gain.

Teams have to either score or get first downs or they turn the ball over. A twenty yard pass gets one first down, but followed by three incompletions you have to punt.

Get 3 or 4 yds a carry consistently, you get only 12-16 yards every four downs, but gain first downs endlessly.

You obviously, by the same logic, put yourself in 2nd and 6, 3rd and 2 etc., never in 3rd and ten.

Since football is a game with it's own incentives, I can't understand why these stats people keep trying to force it into analyses that don't fit it's strategies.

You've not bothered to read nor understand anything in that article or about the broader subject. You didn't even bother to read the excerpt I posted which says this:

Application of game theory hinges on true measures of utility. The real difficulty in applying game theory to football on a practical level would be to develop a valid measure of the preferences of the various payoffs in the game matrix. Yards or points would seem like suitable measures, but a 3-yard gain is far more useful on 3rd and 2 than on 3rd and 9. And a 3-point field goal is fairly useless down by 7 late in the 4th quarter. In a forthcoming article I'll attempt to solve this problem with a proposed utility function for football.

You've then gone on to set up some bizarre false dichotomy that has nothing to do with what I've posted or anything I've posted about. Efficiency as measured by EPA is expected points added, not YPP, so effectively all you did was create some nerd strawman. This is a context-neutral narrative analysis that tells us overall the Pats are running the ball too much. So citing a specific example like Joker did of where he thought the Pats should have ran instead of passed isn't very instructive beyond that specific circumstance.

 

[Deus Irae]

This is 2013.

Sorry to break the news to you, but Gronkowski and Hernandez are not on the field and 3 of their 5 WR's are rookies.

Who knew? Everyone here but you, evidently.

My posting history shows quite clearly that I knew this full well.

Not surprising that you are so blind to this. After all, yesterday, you were the guy who wanted the Pats to use the 5 wide with Vereen spilt out on a torrentially rainy day!

No, what I suggested was that they use 5 wide, and that they use 4 wide + Vereen, which is precisely what that link says. That became a non-issue once Dobson got hurt. As for the weather, I'm not sure why you think that should change the point, given that it pretty obviously didn't stop either QB from making throws.

Post #27:
"Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?
Gotta love this place...."

Then the game happened.....

And the Brady's one interception was because Vereen couldn't handle a slippery pass. The running game destroyed the Bills.

And the Patriots had multiple fumbles in the running game, but were fortunate enough to recover them.

But, amazingly, you kept pitching!

Someone has to point out when you make really silly posts.

In response to JMC00's post #28 "Today it was" response to your ""Now putting the ball in Brady's hands, instead of this team's inconsistent running game, is playing with fire?

You answered with one of your comedy classic "No it wasn't" answers in post #29.

It wasn't. There really wasn't more that needed to be said.

Bobsyouruncle made a good argument counter to my point. It was factual and had substance to it. I don't fully agree with it, but can respect it and can learn from it.

You are just writing graffiti for the sake of argument.

My arguments were factual. You choosing to disagree with the obvious doesn't change it.


Correlation is not causation. The refs would have called that penalty in the Jets game even if the Patriots had run the ball 14 more times. They still would have let the PI go in the Carolina and Miami games, even if the Patriots had run the ball 25 more times.

 

[ausbacker]

I've always been for a strong running attack and more balance, but I think you're off base talking about the early games. By Cinci, and earlier, the league knew we had no helthy receivers that could run patterns and hold on to the ball, therefore they were undoubtedly jamming the middle. Brady had to force the ball until someone caught it and commanded some respect fron the defense.

Edelman didn't all of a sudden go from a marginal player to 100 catches, he was going to get thrown to until they could loosen up that D and get the kids off (even if he had to hurt their feelings lol).

If the Bengals were jamming the middle there's no reason to think the Patriots couldn't run off tackle. Lately, Blount's been doing this very well. You've got a myriad of plays available to you that I am sure the Patriots could execute.

The thing I like about the Patriots run game is it isn't one dimensional. The different RBs and schemes they can execute is what makes their use of the run game dangerous. If it's offered then take it and work the play-action.