The Rams’ 4th down Call Won A Ring.

If you want to see just how deeply pervasive the oldheaded, jock-centric view of football is in the NFL and the media that covers it, look no further than the panel of players covering the Super Bowl on the season finale of Inside The NFL. You can find it on youtube. Ray Lewis in particular calls it a grave tactical error.

For context, the situation was 4th and 1 at the Bengals 50 yard line. They did not convert, and the Rams went down and scored. So, for those of you who understand the rules, you know that this fourth down call, as compared to a touchback punt, sacrificed 25 yards (2.5 first downs if you prefer). Apparently this counts as putting your defense in a bad position. (I’d source the tweet from Ed Reed on twitter, but he blocked me, because I guess he’s a big baby now and can’t handle trolling from a fan of his own team. Doesn’t he have better things to do than read the replies?)

Now, call me crazy, but if a possession starts at the 50 yard line, that’s a 67-yard field goal if you kick it right then and there, which would be the new NFL record. So, in fairness, yes, you have put your defense in the position that if they don’t get an immediate 3 and out, the other team is now in field goal range. (They may already be in range thanks to rookie kicker Evan McPherson who had the best statistical postseason of any kicker ever, 14 field goals from various distances, 100% accuracy.) Here’s the thing though: the game is 0–0, and if you give up a field goal . . . nobody cares. The coaching staff already told you they don’t care if you give up 3 by going for it on that fourth down. Y’know why? Because as soon as the Bengals score a touchdown and kick the extra point, it’s already a 4-point game, and the Rams would then need to actually score a touchdown to be in the lead. Going down 3–0 in the first quarter is nowhere close to the end of the world. And y’know what? Neither is going down 7. Perhaps that’s a little too “aggressive” to expect that at some point your offense is going to score a touchdown and either get the lead or tie the game, but I feel like any serious analysis of this would tell you that even in the most disastrous situation, you still have a really good chance of being able to win the game, just from a pure numbers standpoint.

Then there’s momentum. The Rams had just gone 3 and out on offense to start the game. If the Bengals had been able to convert a 4th down on the Rams defense to retain possession and ultimately score, the psychological effects of that could’ve been absolutely devastating, whereas I don’t think most people would argue that the Rams get a huge psychological boost from making a 4th down stop. For a defense at the level of the 2021 Rams, making a 4th and 1 stop after having stopped 2nd and 3 and 3rd and 1 should be routine, winning that down is largely about avoiding embarrassment.

There are plenty of levels on which this is a decent tactical decision even if it doesn’t go your way at all.

There are a lot of reasons the Bengals lost this game, but it’s very easy to point at a, by today’s standards, pretty tame 4th-and-go-for-it call and say “you gave the Rams free points.” In reality, their defense, which had forced a 3 and out on the first drive and kept the Rams out of field goal range for most of the game, did not have their best stuff on that drive and allowed a touchdown. But you know what’s even more important? After managing to get the lead later (largely because of a 1-play drive that should’ve been negated by offensive pass interference,) the Bengals failed to score on their final five offensive possessions out of 13 total. That’s probably because they were vastly overmatched on defense, facing unfavorable success likelihood on many of those drives.

According to Ben Baldwin’s 4th down bot, which uses formulas very similar to the proprietary ones used by various teams, showed that the Bengals had an overwhelming likelihood to convert 4th and 1, 67%, and simply failed to do so. By comparison, on the last four of five drives, here’s what Cinnci was looking at:

6:20 in the 4th quarter, up by 4 points, 4th and 9 at the Cinnci 40
31% likelihood of conversion. Bot says punt.

11:37 in the 4th quarter, up 4, 4th and 29 at the Cinnci 14

3% likelihood of conversion. Bot says to punt.

0:43 in the 3rd quarter, up 4, 4th and 5 at Cinnci 21

46% likelihood of conversion. (Sounds ok right? Except that even converting that 4th down that deep downfield doesn’t really make them more likely to win.) Bot says to punt.

4:37 in the 3rd quarter, up 4, 4th and 13 at Cinnci 22

20% likelihood of conversion. Bot says to punt.

If you didn’t like that call during the game, do you like it a bit better now? When people are critical of these types of calls, they often say things like “the analytics don’t account for matchup,” etc. Actually, these bots are accounting for those matchups, as the formulas they’re based off of account for offensive and defensive statistics. But here’s the thing: punting on that original go for it call? That was extremely aware of the matchup based on what we can see from these final four of five drives, and if you know ball, at all, you know what I mean.

Anybody could’ve told you going into this game that the Bengals were going to struggle because they have a historically bad offensive line and the Los Angeles Rams have literally two future Hall of Famers on the defensive line, plus a pretty good secondary. That’s exactly what happened most of the game, one of those exceptions being when the Bengals got to the 50 yard line with only one yard needed to convert. If you want to be ruthlessly, unrealistically optimistic about the ability of both the offense and defense to make plays, go right ahead, but the win probability model was basically telling the Bengals “it’s gonna be hard to get shots like this throughout the game. Go for it.” They did. It didn’t work, but it was a shot they had to take.

And just real quick, before I move on, can we also acknowledge that “in spite” of this “boneheaded” call to go for it on 4th down, the Bengals were still up 4 in the 4th quarter? Maybe that’s because the WP% model, accurately, gave the Bengals defense a decent chance of stopping the Rams offense, as they did on most of the Rams offensive possessions. Crazy!

Here’s one of my favorite phrases: But wait, there’s more!

Glossed over somewhat in the highlight package was Sean McVay’s decision in the 4th quarter, with 5 minutes left to play and all 3 timeouts (read: a fucking eternity, really, especially with how often possession was changing hands,) to go for it on his own 30. That worked. Wonder of wonders, the momentum that that created eventually landed them in the endzone with the 7 points they needed to win the game. Inside the NFL didn’t talk about that one at all, even though if it didn’t work, it would look even stupider than the Bengals’ gambit at the 50 yard line.

And y’know what? They should’ve done it sooner. Unlike the Bengals, the Rams had multiple favorable go-for-it situations on 4th down where the WP% model suggested going for it, and they punted instead. There’s an alternate reality here where Sean McVay, a guy who in reality was actively trying to lose every 4th quarter he coached in this postseason, instead trusts the likelihood of conversion more, and the Rams win by 11 or 18 or 21 instead of by 4. Instead, they waited until they had overwhelmingly favorable odds (read: only had to get a yard), and then when they finally did, they called a sweep run with SB MVP Cooper Kupp, a decision I would call significantly ballsier than the actual decision to go for it.

I plan to write more about 4th down calls in the future, but it suffices in this case to say this: the Bengals had to go for it early in the game, because among other things, it represented the greatest chance they had to go for it early in the game without genuinely significant risk. Conversely, the Rams also had to go for it exactly when they did, because it was among the best shots they’d gotten to convert on 4th down all game, and in the end, that “insane” level of aggression fueled a drive that won them the game and the Super Bowl.

If you don’t like the tone of this article, then you’re probably not a fan of Fox Sports One analyst Nick Wright either, and that’s your prerogative, but he got it exactly right: the vast majority of NFL media only ever mocks these decisions when they go wrong. I haven’t seen any articles saying that the Rams’ decision to go for it on 4th down, down 4, deep in their own territory, with all 6 timeouts from both teams left in play, won them the game. It did.

So here’s that article. The Rams’ very aggressive decision to go for it in that situation, which made absolutely perfect sense considering the matchup, was a play call that won them the game.

Long live Brandon Staley.

— Durante Pierpaoli, Lynnwood, WA, 2022