Sports Economics: December 2007 Archives

I blogged a few weeks ago about that paper David Romer wrote in which he said that football teams punt too much.  Well, it appears that someone was listening.  As Levitt on Freakonomics and Dave Berri at the Wages of Wins have both pointed out, a high school team in Arkansas has taken the strategy to its extreme: they never punt.  And, lo and behold, they're tearing up their league (see the TREND 3 section of the Greg Easterbrook story here).  Easterbrook does a much better job than I did at explaining how the "no punt" strategy makes perfect sense if you are used to thinking about probabilities.

Sigh.  I'll have to scratch NFL Coach off my list of dream jobs; when everyone catches on to this, the market won't quite be so inefficient.