C-Cap Recap: Spring Training Stats Edition
April 2, 2015Indians option Jesus Aguilar; Zach Walters heads to DL
April 2, 2015Mike Pettine looks like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be afraid to roll the dice. It’s just a feeling. Seeing Mike Pettine and seeing the way he carries himself,. he appears deliberate about his decision-making, but in the end, he seems like the kind of guy who will bet on his own players to execute. It’s my tendency to support those kinds of “gutsy” decisions more often than not. (Double-trying 75-yard field goals to end a first half excluded of course.)1
Football Outsiders recently updated their “Aggressiveness Index” for NFL coaches for 2014 and it was good to see that my instincts from watching Mike Pettine were backed up by their stats. According to their proprietary calculation, Mike Pettine ranks as the eighth most aggressive coach in the NFL, scoring a 1.23, as measured by fourth-down decision making.
Aggressiveness Index numbers center around 1.0 and generally describe how much more (or less) likely each coach is to go for it on fourth down compared to his peers; for example, a coach with 1.20 AI is roughly 20 percent more likely to go for it than an average coach in equivalent situations. The Aggressiveness Index excludes obvious catch-up situations: third quarter, trailing by 15 or more points; fourth quarter, trailing by nine or more points; and in the last five minutes of the game, trailing by any amount. AI was expanded two years ago to include plays when the offense is on its own side of the field, excluding those obvious catch-up situations.
None of this is to say that aggressiveness means Pettine is a great coach and will ultimately succeed. Bruce Arians is a pretty good coach out in Arizona and he finishes 28th on the list. Chip Kelly, surprisingly to me, also finished down low at 27 with the likes of Tom Coughlin and Jeff Fisher. Additionally, Jim Caldwell from Detroit and previously from Indianapolis, who I think is a pretty miserable head coach finishes on the aggressive side. So I applaud Mike Pettine for being aggressive because that’s my preference for the Cleveland Browns.
More than just being “aggressive” though, I think it’s most important to be consistent. If you’re going to be a guy who goes for it a lot, make sure your team knows this about you and is on board so they’re not wondering. Even as much as I hated the ultra-conservative nature of Pat Shurmur, it he’d sold it as his philosophy and gotten everyone to buy in, and stayed consistent with it, it might have been more successful. The worst thing you can have is the 30 seconds while you’re deciding whether to go for it and have your defense want you to do something and your offense want you to do something and neither having much of an idea as to which way you’re going to go, so there’s surprise and chaos when you do make your decision.
Hopefully Mike Pettine sells his philosophy in his locker room so that no matter which way he goes on a fourth down decision, he has instilled the confidence in the defense to know that he trusts them to go do their job after the punt, or in the offense to get that push for the first down.
- It wasn’t really 75 yards, but it was too long and I didn’t feel like going back to look. [↩]
8 Comments
Aggressiveness index? Ladies and gentleman of the jury one more example of how analytics have gotten completely out of control in sports.
Side note: I like the job Mike Pettine has done and I was not in favor of his initial hiring. That being said I am really interested to see what he does his second year given how badly his first season went down the drain.
19th in the Wins Index.
The ONLY stat that counts.
Analyze that.
Just Win Baby.
Agree on all of this. I’m hoping growing pains will be kept to a minimum, and he needs to show progress – not just maintain what he did last year. I’m interested in seeing if having Flip replace Shanny and Pet playing a bigger role in offense will make a huge difference. I could really see it going either way.
#1 baldest.
Pettine needs his GM to deliver this draft especially in the first round. Start adding players who actually can play and produce. After that it’s Pettine’s job to make it work. Improve guys through coaching. For me what Pettine did best last year was keep a group of dysfunctional pieces together long enough to get seven wins. Unfortunately after they hit six wins they all but went to the bottom of the sea.
I bet Chud would’ve easily been first on this list had he been our coach last year.
That first round bogus is such a sad narrative, overplayed by ESPN and the like who don’t actually follow the browns in depth.
In hindsight, Farmer’s 2014 offseason (Bitonio, West, Kirksey, Desir, 2015 1st 4th and 6th round picks, Crowell, K’waun, Gabriel, Dansby, Whitner, and Hawkins) was a success.
Completely agree….how can you rank high on the index if your offense is efficient and rarely gets into 3rd down situations?