"An almost playoff game and you decide to turn down points because something called analytics says it's smart," Mike Lombardi, a writer, broadcaster and former NFL general manager, tweeted last December. "You deserved to lose last night -- more proof each game is different and each situation is a stand-alone. No chart or some kid in a basement playing Madden can help."
It was the morning after the Los Angeles Chargers had suffered a gut-wrenching home loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. The game itself was a thriller, with the Chiefs scoring the first 10 points and the Chargers scoring 21 of the next 24 before a back-and-forth fourth quarter sent the game to overtime. Just 75 seconds into the extra period, a 34-yard Patrick Mahomes-to-Travis Kelce pass gave Kansas City a 34-28 win.
The teams combined for 924 yards and 54 first downs, but the story of the game came from a handful of times the Chargers couldn't move the chains or put the ball in the end zone. They went 2-for-5 on fourth downs, turning the ball over on downs in Chiefs territory at the 5-yard line in the first quarter, at the 1 on the final play of the first half and at the 28 early in the second half.
This wasn't unusual for Brandon Staley's Chargers. They made multiple fourth-down attempts in seven games in 2021. As Staley told the media after the Chiefs game, "That's the way we're going to play." They went a combined 7-for-10 in midseason wins over the Las Vegas Raiders, Cleveland Browns and Philadelphia Eagles and an incredible 6-for-7 in their wild, Week 18 loss to the Raiders. But the successes went mostly unacknowledged by Lombardi and other critics.
A sports argument is never, ever settled. If you think nerds are ruining [insert sport here], then you probably always will. But the vociferous nature of the pushback against Staley seemed almost like a "last throes" moment of sorts, and the old nerds-in-basements trope felt stale. If the past few seasons of both pro and college football have taught us anything, it's that the sport is listening to the nerds a lot more than it used to.
How Lane Kiffin gave the nerds a boost
Michael McRoberts was working for a credit bureau a decade or so ago when curiosity got the best of him.
"Watching games, some of the decisions that coaches were making just didn't seem right to me," he said. "I was on a road trip for business, and I went into Excel and started to do some calculations. The math really didn't match up to the choices."
He got his hands on some college football play-by-play data and started crunching numbers. "What occurred to me was that there are a lot of tools out there, but there really weren't many people trying to help the coaches themselves make decisions" on matters like fourth downs and 2-point conversions, he said. "That really became the inspiration. Could we put together something where, if a situation came up in the game, we could give a coach the mathematical recommendation to use as part of the decision-making process?"
This question became the raison d'etre for forming Championship Analytics, or CAI.
It started with one school, then a few, then a few more. Now CAI provides decision books for more than half the teams in the FBS, plus four NFL teams and teams at both the small-college and high school levels.
"There was not a gigantic mission at the start," McRoberts said. "It was truly just crunching some numbers in a spreadsheet when I got stuck in a storm in Buffalo. And here we are."
One of CAI's first public breakthroughs came in 2017 and '18, when Army, a CAI client, went a combined 21-5. The Black Knights played the margins beautifully, not only attempting 66 fourth-down conversions but succeeding on 50 of them and going 10-3 in games decided by one score. Head coach Jeff Monken openly referenced to the media the help CAI had provided his team.
Only two teams went for it more than Army in this span, albeit with fewer successes: rival Navy and Florida Atlantic, with a staggering 83 fourth-down attempts. FAU's head coach at the time? Lane Kiffin.