Economic analysis applied to football decisions.

And no, I don't mean the age-old question that owners ask themselves, "How much should I raise the price of a ticket this year?" This is the analysis of the value of going for it on fourth down vs. kicking the ball, done by a UC Berkeley economist, where the conclusions reached suggest that teams should be less conservative in their decisions and ought to go for it more often. For instance, where you're on the opponent's 7 yard line, and you have fourth-and-two, going for it yields an average value of about 4 and a third points while kicking the field goal yields a value of almost 3 points (from that distance, it's almost automatic). One of the factors not often considered in this situation is that if you don't make the first down, the opponents get the ball at around their 7 yard line, while if you kick the field goal, after the kickoff, they'll get the ball somewhere around their 25 or 27 yard line - and that difference in field position is valuable to you, too.

Another conclusion is that on short-yardage fourth downs, from almost anywhere on the field, you're better off by going for it than by kicking. The Patriots' coach, Bill Belichick, read the paper last year, and must have remembered it in the conference championship game two weeks ago: at fourth-and-one on their own 44 yard line, on the first possession of the game, they went for it, to the surprise of the commentators in the TV booth. And, of course, they went on to win the game. I'm willing to be that the Panthers' coach has made a point of studying this paper during the past two weeks, too.