RaveDash

OWINGS MILLS, Md. – About 35 seconds passed from the time Lamar Jackson was brought down two yards short of a first down to when Ravens head coach John Harbaugh chased down an official to call timeout.

The Week 7 matchup in Seattle was tied at 13, and time was winding down in the third quarter. Because of a drop and a penalty, the Ravens had faced a third-and-15 from the Seahawks’ 21. Rain was falling, and they hadn’t had a great day passing the ball, so offensive coordinator Greg Roman called an option run. Jackson kept it and picked up 13 yards to set up fourth-and-2. Now Harbaugh had a decision to make.

Advertisement

The 12th-year head coach doesn’t claim to be some kind of analytics expert or mathematics savant. It’s not that complicated, Harbaugh says. He just likes having the right information to help his team win.

“I trust my eyes first,” he says during a recent interview on the field at the team’s indoor practice facility. “And then the information confirms or opens your eyes to something. And you can go, ‘Oh, I’ve got to look at that or consider that.’”

One thing Harbaugh has taken a close look at is how he can best give the Ravens an edge with his in-game decision-making. For years, he’s had a staffer in the booth communicating win probabilities to him during games. First, it was Matt Weiss, who has since become the running backs coach. This season, it’s football analyst (that’s his official title) Daniel Stern, a 25-year-old behavioral economics major who grew up in Baltimore, got his degree from Yale and is in his fourth season with the Ravens.

During the week, Stern, Harbaugh and other members of the Ravens coaching staff come up with a plan for how they want to approach each game from a strategic perspective. They decide on a set of rules that will give them the best chance to win, and Stern reminds Harbaugh of those rules on the headset during the game. At the beginning of that drive against the Seahawks, they talked about how they wanted to be aggressive in short yardage. But with a third-and-15 run play called, it seemed unlikely that they were going to be in short yardage. Jackson, as he’s done all season, exceeded expectations with his run. The numbers said to go for it, but it wasn’t a no-brainer.

“There was definitely an advantage to going for it in that situation, mathematically it was the correct thing to do,” Stern says weeks later. “But if it had been fourth-and-4 or fourth-and-5, then it wouldn’t have been the correct thing to do. It was fourth-and-2, I think it was either a long 2 or a regular 2. It definitely wasn’t one-and-a-half. It definitely was a full 2 yards.”

Advertisement

Before Jackson’s third-down run, the field-goal unit was on alert. They were told to go out on the field for the kick if Jackson didn’t get the first down. But now Harbaugh wasn’t sure if that would be the right decision. Stern sits next to Roman in the booth during games and views the TV feed so he can fill Harbaugh in on exact distances in situations like this one. He reminded Harbaugh that according to the rules they decided on during the week, this was a go and that they could use a timeout if necessary. Harbaugh then started talking to Roman. He wanted to know what the play call was going to be — again, this was something that had been mapped out during the week. Roman told him it was going to be another run with Jackson.

In that moment, Harbaugh had to weigh the win probability numbers with how the Ravens were playing offensively and how much he liked Roman’s call against the Seahawks’ defense.

“We were doing OK, there was some looseness going on, I wasn’t feeling great about how things were going,” Roman recalls. “We weren’t dominating the game. I could have gone either way with it. It made sense either way. But I liked the play we had for it. We were prepared for the situation.”

Harbaugh heard what he needed to from Roman and Stern and saw Jackson coming to the sideline as Justin Tucker lined up for the kick.

“Harbs saw him as he was running off the field,” says Stern. “And Harbs takes his headset off. I knew as soon as he took his headset off that we were going because I’ve talked to Lamar about it before, and Lamar always wants to go. He’s obviously extremely confident. Our offense has been awesome all year — especially in short-yardage situations. So when he went to Lamar there, I knew that was the direction we were gonna go. He put his headset back on. He’s like, ‘Alright we’re calling timeout.’ He goes down there, he calls timeout and then we went for it, which I was obviously really happy about.”

"Hell yeah, Coach. Let's go for it!" @Lj_era8 pic.twitter.com/n7WMAQqoID

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) October 21, 2019

Harbaugh called timeout with just five seconds on the play clock. Roman found QB power on his call sheet, and Jackson worked his magic for an 8-yard touchdown.

Aggressive fourth-down calls have become practically a weekly occurrence for the Ravens. They’ve gotten 10 of 14 fourth-down attempts on the season, tied with the Colts for the most conversions in the league. And on the 10 drives where they’ve converted, eight have resulted in touchdowns. They’re averaging 10.5 yards per play on fourth down, which is tops in the NFL.

Advertisement

In Week 3, the Ravens prepared for a matchup at Kansas City to face a Chiefs team that had scored 68 points in its first two games. Baltimore’s defense, meanwhile, was trying to work in new pieces and was still finding itself. As Harbaugh and his staff cultivated their game plan that week, they determined they had to prioritize scoring points and keeping Patrick Mahomes off the field above everything else.

“Going into the game, we knew what (Harbaugh’s) thoughts were,” says center Matt Skura. “We were all for it. Get as many points as you can and be aggressive against a really good team. We had an idea going into it what was gonna happen. Really just keeping our offense on the field as long as possible because of their ability to score so quickly and score so many points.”

Adds Harbaugh, “The whole thing, we just felt like it was more of a possession game. We wanted to make sure every possession counted, so if we could extend ours, that was really gonna be important at all costs. We didn’t care about the length of the field just because of how Mahomes was playing at the time and all that.”

In the first quarter, the Ravens went for it on fourth-and-3 from the Kansas City 9. They got it and ended up scoring a touchdown a play later. Harbaugh went for it again on fourth-and-1 from the Baltimore 34 in the second quarter, and the Ravens got it. On the same drive, they faced a fourth-and-2 from their own 47. This time, Jackson threw incomplete. When the Ravens were down 30-19 in the fourth quarter, Harbaugh went for two. The math was sound. He wanted the Ravens to be in a position to win the game in regulation with another TD, an extra point and a field goal.

But the rest of the fourth quarter didn’t go the way the Ravens hoped, and they lost 33-28. Harbaugh got hammered by some for his relatively unconventional approach and tried to explain himself during his Monday news conference.

“A lot of work goes into it,” he said at the time. “There’s a lot of time that goes into it. It’s not just made-up stuff. I think if you do your homework online, even, and you pull up how football analytics work, you can dig up a lot of information. And if you’re a reporter or you’re on the radio or something like that, I would think that would be part of your job to do that and to explain to the fans exactly what the math is and how it works and how much goes into it.”

Harbaugh made it clear that the loss wasn’t going to change the Ravens’ process or aggressive mindset.

Advertisement

“We always have a plan every week,” he says now. “The beginning of the week we talk. The end of the week we decide. But we knew how we were gonna play that game so we were practicing that way. You’ve gotta get the plays up and all that kind of stuff. And then we finalize it on Saturday morning. You’ve gotta have a strategy, and that was just our strategy in that game. That was the most extreme we’ve been in that direction all year — probably for a lot of years. Just that game, we made the biggest commitment to playing that way.

“I don’t know why people don’t understand, it’s just a strategy. It’s just an approach you take to the game based on what you think gives you the best chance to win. It’s not like you’re trying not to win.”

Harbaugh’s explanation makes perfect sense. Yet there is a wide variance overall in how teams approach fourth downs throughout the NFL.

In a sport where coaches constantly preach aggressiveness, many seem to prefer losing the game later over trying to win the game now. Harbaugh has had seasons where he’s been among the most aggressive coaches in the league, but with Jackson and an offense that ranks third in overall efficiency, he’s taken it to another level in 2019.

“The more we’ve done it, it’s been the years I felt like we could get it,” he says. “You feel confident in your guys and their ability to get it and how the offense is doing. This year is probably the most confident I’ve felt in our offense so we do it the most, plus probably the most convinced that it’s the right thing to do just based on what we’ve learned over the last few years.”

The Ravens, like other teams, have built their own analytical model for fourth-down decision-making that accounts for a number of factors — factors that they prefer not to share publicly. There are two numbers to weigh with every decision. One is win probability — a percentage that reflects the team’s chances of winning based on the various options at any given time in the game. The other number is a break-even success probability. The model comes up with an estimate of how likely the team is to convert the fourth down. Part of the decision then comes down to how high that number has to be to justify going for it.

Advertisement

“It might be that there’s a decision that because we’re up by 14 points already, the decision that we make doesn’t change our win probability very much because we’re really likely to win the game no matter what,” explains Stern. “But in that moment we know that we would only need like a 15% chance of getting it to justify going for it. It doesn’t change our win probability that much in the game. It’s just the risk/reward calculus. So there’s situations like that too.

“Or maybe there’s one where the win probability is really big, but it’s only because it’s a tight decision in a critical moment in the game. Like late fourth quarter, we could have a really tight decision where on average we’re gonna get it 55% of the time, we think, and to justify going for it we need to get it at least 50% of the time. So that’s a really tight difference. We would need to be very confident in our estimate of how likely we are to get it in order for that decision to be the correct decision. So it’s a really tight decision compared to one where the break-even is 20% and the probability of getting it is 50%.”

Stern sat with Weiss in previous years and watched him communicate with Harbaugh during games. He noticed that Weiss didn’t mince words and was direct. There can be brief back-and-forths, but Harbaugh often has a short amount of time to make a decision.

What makes it easier, according to Stern, is that Harbaugh is familiar with concepts like win probability and expected points added (EPA). He wants to know the actual numbers in his headset during the game as he’s making decisions.

“We talk about all the different scenarios, and he basically gives me a percentage,” says Harbaugh. “So what’s the added win percentage of going for it? He’ll give it to me like one, two, three, four, five, six, up to whatever. Then you just decide if you want to do it. It’s not strictly based (on the numbers). I listen to it. If he starts telling me 3 and 4 percent, I get really interested. If it’s 1 or 2 percent, I’m still interested — especially if it’s short, if I think we can get it.”

Says Stern, “I just remind him during the game that this is what we were planning to do. If something’s changed, then he’ll argue back. You’ve just gotta be ready for him to push back, like, ‘You really think we should?’ Or ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I don’t take offense to that during a game at all. He’s the head coach so he’s gonna make the decision that he thinks is best.”

There’s a school of thought that coaches can’t date analytics, they have to marry them. The idea is that to see the benefit of using the numbers, you have to stick with them and always follow what they say. If you’re picking and choosing, then what’s the point? You’re not going to gain the edge you’re looking for.

Advertisement

Stern understands that school of thought but says given all the variables involved, it’s a little more complicated.

“I just think that every decision, you have a confidence interval,” he says. “An economist would say you have a confidence interval, but just as a person thinking about it, you know that you’re just making these guesses about how likely you are to win the game. You’re making your best guesses. Math is helping you make better guesses than you might be able to make purely with your intuition. But you’re making your best guesses, and every single one of those guesses, it’s not precise. Like you don’t know for sure, ‘Ok we have a 65% chance of getting it.’ What does that mean when you get to the line and you see how they’re lined up and you see who they have on the field?

“You know where you are in the ballpark, and if there’s an extreme difference between how likely you need to be to get it and how likely you are to get it, then those are the situations where you want to go for it, right? But then when it gets tighter, who’s to say that his intuition about how likely we are to get it isn’t better than whatever estimate that we have is? What’s important is that he’s cognizant, which he is, of if we do get it and we don’t get it, how does that impact our probability of winning the game down the line? And then with all of that information, he is better at making decisions than a computer would be. But better for it also because he has a really acute awareness of what the computer would do if it were him.”

Ten games in, fourth-down aggressiveness is part of the Ravens’ identity. If there’s an opportunity to go for it, players expect Harbaugh to keep the offense on the field. There’s a value in that trust Harbaugh has built with his players that cannot be quantified.

“It’s just confidence,” says Jackson. “Our coach believes in us. …He believes that we can do it, and we just have to honor it and do our job – get the first down.”

Adds tight end Hayden Hurst, “He tells us every single week, every meeting, ‘We’re gonna be aggressive.’ And I think that confidence he puts in us is paying off.”

Harbaugh acknowledges that showing trust in his players with the fourth-down decisions has had a positive impact on the overall culture.

Advertisement

“Absolutely,” he says. “I feel like if you show the players that you believe in them and you trust them, now I’m not gonna try to put them in a bad spot. I think players are always gonna want to go for it. So as a coach, it’s your job to protect them as well. So I’ve gotta keep that in mind. But it is that. And really, so they feel trusted.

“But it’s not just that I want them to feel trusted, it’s that I do trust them. I really do feel like we’re gonna execute in those situations. I think we have a good play. A lot of it’s whether you think you have a good play against whatever they’re doing. If I don’t think we have a good play, I don’t feel comfortable with what we have against whatever they’re doing, then you don’t do it. So it’s probably just as much the X’s and O’s as it is the belief. I do agree that belief’s a big part of it.”

General manager Eric DeCosta has been open about his interest in using analytics to help the Ravens make better-informed personnel decisions. As for Harbaugh, Stern first describes him as “data-driven” but then realizes that’s not exactly accurate. Leaning back in his chair in the cafeteria at the practice complex, he pauses for a few seconds and then thinks back to a story from a couple of years ago. Harbaugh was on a visit with his daughter to Virginia Tech. They were getting some pizza when a student, who happened to be a Ravens fan, approached Harbaugh for a photo. They started talking, and the student explained that he had recently done a report for an introductory statistics course on which traits mattered most when scouting quarterbacks. Harbaugh switched from dad mode to coach mode and told the student to email him the report. Harbaugh forwarded it to Stern and told him to take a look and get back to the student.

“The tenor of the message was, ‘Is there anything in here that we don’t know?’” recalls Stern. “It’s one of the reasons he’s such a good coach because a good idea can come from anywhere. And never assume that we have the right answer. And be open to information. He always says, ‘If you don’t like change, you’re gonna like irrelevancy even less.’ So I would just say that story to me showed he’s really receptive to anything from anyone, and there’s an intellectual humility there. Like we don’t think that we necessarily have the right answers now, but we’re just trying to do it as well as we can.”

Every week, Stern watches games from around the league and studies how teams handle clock management, timeouts, two-point decision-making, fourth-down decision-making, accepting/declining penalties and other in-game situations. The Ravens have a meeting where they discuss how they’d handle similar scenarios.

That process has helped Roman in particular. He often knows at the beginning of a drive whether the Ravens are going to go for it on fourth down. That knowledge changes how he calls early downs.

“Totally different,” Roman says. “It is critical to know ahead of time in my mind what we’re gonna do on fourth down. That changes the price of poker, as they say, completely. I’ve got a completely different set of things in my mind if we’re in a four-down situation. Like when somebody, and I’ve had this happen before, at the last second, ‘We need to go for it!’ When I can mentally process things ahead of time, it helps tremendously. That’s big.”

Advertisement

Jackson is the biggest reason why the Ravens are 8-2, and everyone in the organization happily acknowledges that. But coaching matters. The defense has started to find itself in recent weeks and is up to 10th in efficiency. Roman has done a brilliant job of building an offense around Jackson’s many talents. The Ravens are getting contributions from key veterans like Mark Ingram and Earl Thomas.

And Harbaugh has done an excellent job of playing to his team’s strengths, giving the Ravens an advantage with in-game decision-making every week. The point isn’t even necessarily about his fourth-down aggressiveness. It’s about Harbaugh’s openness to whichever process will give his team a chance to win, or as he put it: “We’re chasing everything that’s gonna give us an edge.”

(Top photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today Sports)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kGxwb2hpZnxzfJByZmppX2d%2FcK3NmqOyrJmYrq15xJ2enmWYpMRuts6hpWagkaevosHGoWSappRiv6LCxKeqZqCRq7Jus8CipZ6cXZa7bq3Dr5inrJGcsm7DyK2fZp6fqr%2B1tIydprCmXZa0qL7ErKqirpWjsrS%2Fjg%3D%3D