I stumbled across this oddity today that fascinated me.  Field goal kickers are more likely to make a kick if the distance to a first down is greater, even if the kick is from the same distance.  For example, let’s say a field goal kicker has a 48 yard field goal.  They’re more likely to make that kick if it’s 4th and long, than they are if it’s 4th and short.

When a kicker attempts a 48 yard kick from 4th and 1, they only make it about 60% of the time.  But the same distance on 4th and 12 is make about 70% of the time.  They’re the same kick.  The line of scrimmage is the 30, and the distance is 48 yards in both cases.  It really shouldn’t matter whether it’s 1 yard for a first down, or 12.

I’ve cherry picked those distances to go, but this trend holds up over sample sizes of better than 200 kicks.

Here’s a graph which breaks kicks from similar distances into whether they were attempted with 7 yards or less to gain, or more than 7 yards to gain for a first down.  The kick attempted with more than 7 yards to gain were made at about 70%, whereas the kicks with fewer yards to gain (but from the same yard line on the field) were only made about 64% of the time.  I split them based on that division so that there would be about 300 attempts in each group.

So why would kickers make more field goals when the yards to gain are greater?  Probably because they are trying to salvage points that they had already assumed the team would get in their minds.  When a team attempts a kick from the 30 yard line and it’s 4th and 20, that means that at one point they had a 1st and 10 from the 20 yard line.  The kicker, and probably the rest of the team, already assumed they were getting points out of that drive.  So when the kicker lines up the kick, he’s extremely focused on making sure that the team leaves with points on the board.  But when it’s 4th and 1 from the 30, that series of downs started at the 39 yard line.  From the 39 yard line, they probably didn’t assume that they would be scoring for sure.  Maybe in that instance the kicker just isn’t concentrating as much.

Behavioral economists call this Loss Aversion.  Studies have shown that the motivation to avoid a loss might be twice as great as the motivation to make a gain.

The difference in kicker performance based on yards to gain is similar to studies that have been done on golfers’ putting performance.  Golfers looking at say an 8 foot par putt make that put more often than golfers putting from 8 feet for birdie.  When the putt is for par, their desire to avoid a loss (leaving the hole with a bogie) is strong enough to get them to concentrate and make sure that they sink the putt.  It looks like kickers exhibit the same aversion to losses.

Earlier in the week I offered a little evidence that coaches tend not to get better with age.  Today I thought I would look a little more specifically at what happens when teams hire older coaches who have prior head coaching experience.  This is the choice that a lot of NFL teams are confronted with.  Do they hire the older coach with the longer resume?  Or do they opt for the younger coach who is less of a known commodity?

For the purposes of today’s exercise I’ll only look at the coach’s first three years with a team.  That’s an amount of time that would probably allow for public opinion to be set.  It’s also an amount of time that should in theory at least favor the older coaches.  The first three years of a younger coach’s tenure will include, at least in part, just learning how to be a head coach, whereas older coaches should already know.

The table below shows the winning percentage of coaches during their first three years with a team and split on my general dividing line of 52/53 years old.  My theory has been that a coach crests in ability at about 51 or 52.  What we see is that despite having significantly more experience, the older age group performs worse than the younger age group of coaches.

Even though the younger coaching group had on average 4 years less head coaching experience than the older group, they showed a higher winning percentage.  You’ll note that the winning percentage for each group is relatively low, but that’s because we’re just looking at the first three years for each coach’s tenure with a team.  For a coach to even get hired, it’s likely that the previous coach got fired, which means it’s likely the coach is inheriting a loser.

First Three Years w/Team

	Winning Percentage	Prior Years HC Experience (Average)
Coaches 53 & Older	43.4%	5.33
Coaches 52 & Younger	46.2%	1.01

Teams that struggle, but might think they’re close to being a winning team, might be tempted to go out and hire a coach with a lot of prior experience.  They might be inclined to go get the equivalent of the Redskins hire of Mike Shanahan, or the Saints hire of Mike Ditka, or the Cardinals hire of Dennis Green, or the Carolina Panthers hire of George Seifert, or the 49ers hiring of Dennis Erickson… you get the point.

But the chances for turnaround might actually be even lower if teams opt for the older coach.

With the regular season over and several coaches fired already, I figured I would post the results of some of the stuff I’ve been working on recently.  I’m very interested in the age effects that NFL coaches might experience.  Last night I tweeted that NFL coaches typically have coached their best football by the age of about 51 or 52.  It’s not going to be the same in every case, but that’s the age that coaches tend to crest if you look at about the last 30 years of results.

In order to measure whether coaches decline in their 50’s, you can’t just break the NFL up into age cohorts and average the winning percentage for each year.  This doesn’t work because you run into what we call survivor bias.  Basically only the good coaches survive to coach into their 50s, so you end up comparing good coaches who are coaching at the age of 57 with bad coaches who might get fired before they even reach 50.

What I’ve done instead is to measure each coach’s winning percentage at each age, and then compared it with their career average winning percentage.  So let’s say that Bill Belichick posts a winning percentage of 1.000 in 2007 at the age of 55.  That’s 0.360 above his career winning percentage of 0.640, so that year counts +.36 for Belichick.  Another example is that in 2010, Wade Phillips posted a 0.125 winning percentage in his final year with the Cowboys when he was 63 years old.  So that counts as –0.41 for Wade because his career winning percentage is 0.540.

If we do that with every NFL coach who was a head coach since 1980, we can average the +/- relative winning percentage for each age.  Here’s a graph of the results:

The X axis is basically at 0 when compared to a coach’s career winning percentage.  The red line is a smoothed trendline, but the average relative winning percentages for all coaches are shown by the blue dots, just so you can see the data points in addition to the trendline.  Basically a coach is going to post winning percentages higher than their career average when they are in their 40’s and then things are going to slightly decline in their 50’s, which becomes a rapid decline when they’re almost 60.

If you want a simple way to interpret the graph, you could say that a 0.600 coach is likely to be closer to .500 in the year that they are 60 years old.

Before I move on to what implications this information might have for hiring coaches, let’s also look at the distribution of ages of NFL coaches, as well as the age distribution of Super Bowl winners.  The graph below shows a normal distribution that you get when you use the mean age and standard deviation for these subsets of coaches.  The basic takeaway – Super Bowl winners are younger than the average coach, but it’s not just that they’re younger on average, the distribution curve shows us that Super Bowl winners are a lot more tightly clustered around the age of 49.  Coaches with winning records were 1/2 year younger on average than coaches with losing records.

It might be easier to look at the same information in table form:

	Average Age
Super Bowl Winners	48.9
Conference Champions	49.7
Coaches With Winning Records	50.4
Coaches with Losing Records	50.9

How then should this information be interpreted?

First, this information is also consistent generally with what science can tell us about the way the brain ages.  As we get older we continue to increase or maintain our knowledge and experience (crystallized intelligence) while our problem solving abilities (fluid intelligence) are deteriorating.  For an NFL coach it’s a matter of threading the needle and compiling enough experience to be a good coach, while your problem solving abilities are still generally intact.  Coaching football isn’t a contemplative profession, decisions have to be made quickly and in the fog of war so to speak.  So problem solving is extremely important.  The other thing to keep in mind is that often these older coaches are coaching against competitors who also have a lot of experience, but are younger and might be a little sharper from a cognitive standpoint.

For instance, when Jim Caldwell faces off against Sean Payton, both have a lot of football experience.  Payton has been coaching since he was 23, so he has over 20 years of coaching experience.  But Payton is also about 13 years younger than Caldwell, which means that it’s likely (not guaranteed) that he can process information faster.

For the purposes of making coaching personnel decisions, to me it seems like this information should be one of a number of factors that is looked at.  If you’re a team and you have a 0.500 coach at the helm, and that coach is also getting older (like has passed 53 years old), then you know that not only have they probably coached their best football, but their best football wasn’t that great anyway.  Unless there’s a compelling reason to keep them around, it might be time to get younger.  But alternatively, if you have a great coach who is entering his late 50’s, your replacement might not be as good as your older coach.  Maybe it’s just time to get him a little more help that might address some of the slowing in cognitive processes that occur as people get older.

Lastly, if you’re an NFL team and you’re on a coaching search, there’s probably not a lot of upside in hiring the known coaching names who are also older.  Jeff Fisher is 53 years old and is a lifetime 0.530 coach.  He’s an example of a guy who has a ton of experience and had the chance to use that experience throughout his 40s, but was really just above average.  He would be a rare case if he suddenly became a really great coach later in his career.

Maybe one cautionary tale is Mike Shanahan.  The Redskins are paying him something like $7 million per season because he’s a coaching legend with multiple Super Bowl titles.  But he won those Super Bowls when he was 45 and 46 years old.  He’s 59 now and will be 60 years old next year.  He was a 0.580 coach until he turned 53 and has only been a .500 coach since.  What are the chances he turns things around at the age of 60?