original poster":3gm60jhi said:
If totally abandoning the run was a good idea and passing 100% of the time is the solution to failing teams problems, why don’t they do it?
With just how deep teams go into analysis and research, do you not think they’d have figured it out by now?
No team has the balls to do things at the min or max limits nor are there enough games in a season to robustly test ideas out.
As much as we like to imagine coaches are imbued with an almost predatory instinct towards solving the game of football, nothing could be further from the truth. Football coaches absolutely don't play the percentages as a whole, don't recursively evaluate their decisions and in fact let their emotions get the best of them at integral inflection points.
The myth that football coaches as a whole are extraordinary game players needs to die - they aren't and the constant gap between optimal play by statistical observation and NFL coaching decisions is profound. You might find individual cases where the coach beats alpha (that being league average results over tenure) but most of the people coaching in the NFL got there by connection, putting up with bullshit that most of us wouldn't, investing in a career that has narrow and specific opportunities, honing their craft with technique as position coaches before getting coordinator opportunities, managing the logistics of team coordination and congruency and many things that have nothing to do with simply being better at making better choices at the right moment.
I have more faith in chess players figuring out football than football coaches figuring out chess, if that makes sense. The 2nd line of yours makes it seem like the NFL is currently operating at perfect football coaching efficiency rather than operating at an acceptable entertaining equilibrium. If football has been figured out so thoroughly by the myriad coaches in the NFL, or if team outcomes are trivially impacted by coaching aptitude when it comes to strategic and tactical choices, then what explains the various levels of team outcomes from coach to coach - team talent alone?
That invokes a weird possibility - Bevell was actually infallible.