more reasons to hate economists
Baseball and golf. And, god help us, poker. That's the July sports landscape; it's not a pretty sight. The only option: start daydreaming about football season. Email invites to fantasy leagues are starting to circulate; plans are beginning to formulate to skip work and go get drunk at training camp. It's much, much too early of course, and the microscopic analysis of the Redskins will be unbearable by the time the preseason actually starts, but what else can we do?
Anyway, I'm primed to notice football items. So a bit of the Onion's review of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds caught my eye. Surowiecki's thesis is that crowds make better decisions than individuals, and one of his examples says that trying to convert on fourth down is a much better idea than kicking a field goal. The crowd at a football game always thinks the team should go for it, and Surowiecki says this is the correct decision. Apparently the decision's quality isn't dependent on the crowd's sobriety.
Unfortunately, the book isn't accessible through Amazon's full text search; and after hearing Surowiecki on the Diane Rehm show a few weeks ago, I can't say I'm interested enough in his work to actually, you know, buy intellectual property.
But this football thing bothers me. A guy named David Romer, an economist at Berkeley, has put together a paper analyzing this problem -- for all I know this could be Surowiecki's source, as it's fairly widely cited on the internet, and, at 42 pages, not just a throw-away essay. As an academic exercise I'm sure it's a success, although I'm certainly not qualified to say. As an analysis of football, even an idiot like myself can tell you it's junk.
Romer says teams should always go for it when within 5 yards of the conversion -- 3 yards or so if you're sitting on your own goal line. He uses first quarter data to eliminate considerations related to the score. Okay. How about the data for the actual conversion attempts? Well, there aren't enough of those for fourth down, so he uses third. Right away you know to throw this analysis out. With higher stakes on fourth down -- namely, the risk of putting your opponent in a position to score -- teams are obligated to go with high percentage plays, which drastically reduces the number of things their opponents need to be ready to defend. On third down you can put the ball up in the air and hope to get lucky, if only to keep the defense from blitzing every third down. On fourth that's not a rational option, and the defense knows it.
Beyond down, what about other considerations? What about the weather, the condition of the field, how your receivers match up against the other guy's secondary, and who on their team is playing hurt? All of these things, and who knows how many others, could make an attempted conversion more or less attractive. If the recorded attempts say that going for it is a good idea, could it simply be that coaches know how to pick their opportunities?
So okay, I'm too lazy to buy the book, and I've haphazardly set up a straw man to stand in as an effigy for Surowiecki. The larger point, though, is that football simply doesn't lend itself to these types of analysis, regardless of the methodology -- it's hard to imagine that a pop-econ book devotes the necessary pages to approach the rigor of Romer's paper, and even if it did, it seems obvious that fourth downs are going to be a bad example under any circumstance. There are way too many variables to build a decent model, and there's no control data available for statistical analysis -- everything is colored by coach's choices.
While of course there is power to be harnessed in the behavior of crowds, it's very easy to overextend yourself: when all you've got is an econ degree, everything starts to look like a market. Soon enough you're advocating referendum-based coaching, or floating ideas like DARPA's short-lived terrorism futures scheme. It gets silly pretty quickly. After all, if crowds make such good decisions, is McDonald's good food?
Maybe Surowiecki realizes that crowds and the markets that organize them don't make smart decisions -- they're just an efficient way of aggregating smart decisions. If that's the case, more power to him. He probably still ought to stay away from football, though.
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