To Fake or Not To Fake: Fourth Down Decisions
Our Chief Analyst, Keith Goldner, takes a look at the success rates of fake field goals and punts versus straight up going for it on fourth down attempts.
Similarly, we looked at the roughly 5500 fourth down normal go-for-it attempts. Granted, a lot of these will take place at the end of the game when teams are down by significant margins or must go for it in order to stay in the game, but that should not greatly affect their conversion rates. It may give us a sample bias, though, because those teams that are losing are typically worse offensively.
Fake attempts are exceedingly rare and given that there are only 200 or so attempts, we must be cautious of sample size issues. The most frequent fake attempts are on 4th-and-1 or 4th-and-2 which have happened about 30 times a piece. Compare that to over 2000 regular go-for-it attempts on 4th-and-1 and over 600 regular attempts on 4th-and-2.
To assess the value of a fake attempt I looked at success rates based on distance-to-go and then used logistic regression to smooth the data. The results:
Read the rest of Keith's analysis on Drive-By Football!