Icing the Kicker

[silverscreenselect]

Hopefully, last week marks the end of the NFL "tradition" of the coach calling a timeout from the sideline a second before the ball is snapped on a potential game winning/tying field goal at the end of the game. Oakland nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when they tried that against the Jets. The first attempt hit the upright; the second (and legal) attempt was good and a game the Raiders should have won in regulation went into overtime.

You are more likely to get a bad snap or a muffled hold the first time you try a field goal because the center and holder haven't done it for a while together. The kicker is also able to get a better idea about wind conditions if he sees what happens to his first attempt. The only advantage is psychological and a guy who has been in the NFL for years isn't likely to be psyched.

Also a belated rant about the Bears from a week ago deciding with a one-point lead and eleven seconds left in the game to squib a kick allowing Atlanta to get decent field position with enough time to complete a 20 yard pass and still have one second left on the clock for a game winning field goal. Kick it deep and unless they run it all the way back it's a sure win. Instead, the Bears gave themselves the only realistic chance of losing the game.

[Jeemie]

Never understood the icing the kicker thing.

It's like you said- all you're doing is giving the other team a practice kick. Why would you do that?

[gsabc]

Used to be the time-out was called after the teams lined up but BEFORE the snap of the ball. Coaches have been cutting it too fine recently, with the results mentioned.

[Jeemie]

Used to be the time-out was called after the teams lined up but BEFORE the snap of the ball. Coaches have been cutting it too fine recently, with the results mentioned.

That's because they're allowed to keep an official right beside them to do this...a rule change that happened last year.

Personally, I think that rule ought to be abolished, and only a player on the field should be allowed to call a timeout.

[Scott Norwood]

You know, I think I heard Bill Parcells call a timeout about 18 years ago.......

[gsabc]

Used to be the time-out was called after the teams lined up but BEFORE the snap of the ball. Coaches have been cutting it too fine recently, with the results mentioned.

That's because they're allowed to keep an official right beside them to do this...a rule change that happened last year.

Personally, I think that rule ought to be abolished, and only a player on the field should be allowed to call a timeout.

Nah. That'd make too much sense.

[thguy65]

Under the old rules, an analysis concluded that calling the timeout was beneficial. More data is probably needed to draw firm conclusions about the new rule.

[etaoin22]

The reference to the study done a few years ago is interesting: It reflects some of the difficulties with all of pop statistics, the official system of reporting scientific research and the Internet. All at once.


While the "journal" Chance is referred to by the American Statistical Association as only a "magazine", as with most highfalutin professional journals, only a fraction of the articles are available free on the net. And this one was not chosen. So, access to the tables of data which might give some feeling about the validity of the method chosen (to take all kicks within the last three minutes with the game on the line) as the comparator group, is not there.

Three minutes was probably chosen as the time required that there are enough kicks that multivariate statistics would yield 'significant" results, but the psych situation of three minutes left -- hey. in modern football, three minutes is an eternity. What I would really like to see is not so much the multi-variate analysis, but a graph of time left in game vs distance of kick, showing all data points, with different colours or boldness or squiggle for success, failure and icing. This might actually be in the original paper, but who knows? My guess is that kickers are completely reliable until the last 30 seconds, and I am not sure what happens after. (call it the Vanderjagt phenomenon -- you wind up playing in another league in a different county, with a coach out of another century, going 5-11 so far this year, and missing a playoff in which 7 out of 9 teams get in)

http://www.argonauts.ca/index.php/roster/show/id/1641

http://www.argonauts.ca/index.php/artic ... n-shootout


And of course on the Net, the references will refer to each other in a spiral noting the result, but giving less and less information about the original data.