Gregg Easterbrook, in his capacity as "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columnist for ESPN.com's "Page 2", has waged a long, bloody war against NFL teams punting on fourth-down-and-short-yardage situations. The statistics don't add up, Easterbrook claims. Rather than punting and delivering the ball to your opponents (one of which may be Devin Hester, who will probably run it back for a touchdown), you should go for it and see what happens. But NFL coaches never seem to listen. Some high school coaches do listen, however, as Easterbrook writes in a recent column:
I first heard about Pulaski [high school in Little Rock, Ark.] from Peter Giovannini of Morrilton, Ark., a high school football official who wrote me to report in astonishment that he had just worked a conference championship game in which the winning team never punted, even going for a first down on fourth-and-6 from its own 5-yard line early in the game. 'As a devotee of TMQ, I thought you might like to know at least one coach in the vast football universe has experienced the epiphany and refuses to punt the ball away,' Giovannini wrote. That team was Pulaski - 9-1-1 after having just won its opening-round game in the Arkansas 5A playoffs. Coach Kevin Kelley reports that he stopped punting in 2005 - after reading an academic study on the statistical consequences of going for the first down versus handing possession to the other team, plus reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback's relentless examples of when punting backfires but going for the first down works. In 2005, Pulaski reached the state quarterfinals by rarely punting. In 2006, Pulaski reached the state championship game, losing by one point - and in the state championship game, Pulaski never punted, converting nine of 10 fourth-down attempts. Since the start of the 2006 season, Pulaski has had no punting unit and never practices punts. This year, Pulaski has punted just twice, both times when leading by a large margin and trying to hold down the final score. In its playoff victory Friday night, Pulaski did not punt, converting three of four fourth-down tries. 'They give you four downs, not three,' Kelley told TMQ. 'You should take advantage. Suppose we had punted from our own 5. The odds are the opposition will take over at about the 35, and from there the stats say they have an 80 percent chance of scoring. So even if you only have a 50 percent chance of converting the first down, isn't that better than giving the other side an 80 percent chance of scoring?' For fourth-and-short attempts, the odds of converting are a lot better than 50 percent.
Except if you're the Washington Redskins and your coach decides to run the ball from the backfield on fourth-and-short even though your quarterback is 6' 5", 230 lbs., and could easily have done a quarterback sneak. But I digress.