Dan Campbell danced with the one who brung him. That his dancing partner tripped and fell on their face and shattered their orbital bone is another story entirely.
The muscle-bound, overly-caffeinated, swashbuckling Detroit Lions head coach, hyper aggressive on fourth downs throughout his head coaching tenure, continued his unorthodox points-maximizing ways into the most important game in Lions’ history: A road affair in the NFC Championship Game against a heavily-favored 49ers team sporting the league’s second highest point differential in 2023.
Campbell during the regular season outpaced all coaches in fourth down aggressiveness, going for it on 34 percent of Detroit’s fourth down conversion opportunities. That, in fact, made the 2023 Lions the most aggressive fourth down team of the 21st Century, according to ESPN Stats & Information Research.
It tracks that Campbell went for it on two second-half fourth downs in Detroit’s title game loss to San Francisco. The Lions failed on both conversion attempts, one of them a fourth and two from the Niners’ 28-yard line early in the third quarter, the other a fourth and three from the 49ers’ 30-yard line with roughly 10 minutes to go in the game.
From the cold, bloodless perspective of the numbers, Campbell’s fourth down decision making was sound, per Ben Baldwin’s Fourth Down Decision Calculator, which accounts for all manner of factors and offers a calculation on what a team would gain (or lose) by converting on fourth down.
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ESPN Analytics was in agreement: Going for it on the third quarter fourth down attempt would have bumped Detroit’s odds of winning the game from 90.3 percent to 90.5 percent. The fourth quarter attempt would have nudged their win probability from 38.8 percent to 39.1 percent (the tiny discrepancy makes one wonder why the anti-analytics crowd is warring online with the analytics nerds).
These fourth down attempts, as you surely know by now, did not…
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