Underdogs and Risk

If a bad team plays a great team 100 times, it will probably only win 10 games. If it plays one game, it has a 10% chance of winning, but it could win 100% of the games. The more plays in a game, the more coin flips there are, giving the better team the higher chance of winning.
Of course playing conservatively is a bit subjective. Short passes and a higher % of running plays is what I think of. If a deep ball is an option and the safety has bitten on play action, you throw that deep ball, you don’t bail out and pass to your rb in the flat.

wrote a great article called How David Beats Goliath – It’s an 8 page masterpiece touching on how underdogs can win at basketball, war, and pretty much anything else by changing the mindset of how to play the game.

It’s brilliant, and well worth reading.

How most NFL coaches play to not lose by doing things like punting far too much or playing prevent all the time.

What this article describes is essentially the strategy followed by the wacky Jack Patera Seahawks of the 1970’s.

Fake punts, trick plays, going for it on fourth down. We did it all, and won a few games we probably would have lost had we played them “by the book”.

an analysis of the play-styles during the playoffs for the recent wildcard teams that made the Superbowl.

Sometimes it seems like teams already know this and try to do this. But then, you really see it crank out, when a team is already eliminated from contention.

But from hearing players talk, such as Hugh Millen, I’ve gotten a sense that players, possibly even coaches, never think they’re one of the worst teams, at the beginning of the season. if you are, it might start to sink in around week 5. There’s the handful of best and handful of worst teams, but everyone else, you more than likely feel like you’ve got just as realistic a shot to win the one game as the opponent, for at least most of the year.

So to employ this as a strategy, it’s predicated on conceding you’re an inferior team. That probably keeps most teams from it, whether from earnest assessment, stubborn pride or face-saving CYA to get one more shot to run the team next year. When you’re the Lions and you find yourself in the headlights of some 16-0 aspiring behemoth, maybe it’s not as hard to concede, but mostly I’d bet it is.

But speaking of 16-0, and teams like the Lions, that’s where I originally was thinking, it seems like this is reflected in the league a little bit, already. The better you are through the season, the cliché is that every team brings their A game against you. The less an opponent has to lose, the more often we see them playing more aggressively. So I see it, circumstantially, and it makes sense, strategically.