Football Strategy

In the same spirit as the Jeopardy! posts, there are some outside-the-box strategies for (American) football.

• This article talks about a high school team that never punts.  Their rationale is by looking at the numbers, the gain of punting (gaining a number of extra yards of field position) is outweighed by the loss of punting (when you go for it on 4th down, you possibly will get a first down, which means you keep the ball and have a possibility to score).  
• Here is an academic paper on NFL teams and the decision to go for a 4th down.  It shows that based on simple probability, NFL teams are more conservative than they should be with this decision. 
• Here is a post from the Freakonomics blog which talks about the NFL draft.  Essentially it says the best pick to have in the NFL draft is not the 1st pick but a later pick.  This is because the highest picks in the draft are paid, on average, much more than they are worth whereas later picks are paid more in line with what they are worth, if not less than they are worth.  If a team chooses not to pay a high pick a large salary, than that pick will holdout, and the team is left with nothing.  Here is an academic paper which supports this thought.
• Here is a Wikipedia page which talks about the A-11 offense.  It was devised by a high school team.  Instead of having one quarterback and five eligible receivers, in the A-11 offense there are two quarterbacks and every player is an eligible receiver.  It is a cool idea to see the basic elements of football strategy turned on their heads.