While my main takeaway from the NFL conference championship games over the weekend was that I'm soooo ready to move on from the Kansas City Chiefs — anyone with me? — I was also struck by the fact that the four teams went for it on fourth down again and again and again... and again and again. They went for it 14 times in all.
For those of us who grew up with football in the ’70s and ’80s, that's a stunning number. If a team was even inches short on fourth down back then, they'd try a field goal or punt. "Take the points." Or, "Kick it away and rely on your defense."
The four teams didn't just go for it deep in their opponent’s territory, in desperation spots late in the game, or on fourth-and-inches, either. Kansas City went for a first down from its own 39-yard line. The Washington Commanders went for the first down twice on their opening drive. The Philadelphia Eagles went for it on fourth-and-5.
The analytics types have actually known for a very long time that teams should go for it on fourth down far more often than they do. In fact, the data says NFL coaches are only maybe a little more than halfway to where they need to get in terms of going for it. (The numbers say to keep your offense on the field on fourth-and-1 even on your own 9-yard line, if you can believe it.)
Yet head coaches have been slow on the uptake even though their win-loss records are such a stark report card, even though at least five of the 32 head coaches lose their jobs every year, and even though the reward for being a head coach is a salary that starts at some $3 million a year and can reach to $20 million a year if you're Andy Reid and keep taking your goshdarn team to the Super Bowl seemingly every year.
That it's taking the NFL literally decades to adapt, despite all the incentives to do so, makes me think about all the impediments to innovation — including in insurance.
If these highly paid NFL coaches struggle, maybe the insurance industry is getting a bit of a bum rap when people complain about the slow pace of change. And maybe we can adapt a tad faster if we understand what's holding those NFL head coaches back — and what is finally breaking them loose.
The big holdups for NFL coaches have been tradition and its sibling, potential embarrassment. By the late 1990s, Moneyball was revolutionizing the use of statistics in baseball, and football coaches had plenty of analytics available to them, but tradition said that you punted or tried a field goal on fourth down. If you ignored tradition and got a first down, the success was treated as an unnecessarily risky one-off. If you failed... well, Barry Switzer saw what happened when he went for it inside his own 30-yard line as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1995. Headlines included, “Switzercide,” “Fourth-and-Dumb,” and “Bozo the Coach,” according to this interesting piece in The Ringer about the evolution of fourth-down strategies.
What finally lit a fire under coaches? It took a stunning call by Bill Belichick, a trick play by the Eagles in a Super Bowl, and then a steady stream of success by increasingly emboldened coaches. So two shocks, and then a track record.
The Belichick shock came in a game in 2009 between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts when he left Tom Brady on the field with 2:08 left in the game on a fourth-and-2. The ball was at the New England 28-yard line. They were leading 34-28. Brady completed a quick pass, but the running back was tackled a hair short of the first down. The Colts took over on downs, and quarterback Peyton Manning threw a touchdown pass with 16 seconds to go. New England lost 35-34.
Even former Patriots players were outraged at Belichick's decision, one calling it the dumbest decision he'd ever seen. The thing is: Everybody knows Belichick isn't stupid. He is likely the best coach in the history of the game — as hard as that is for this diehard Steelers fan to write — and among the most cerebral. So as the debate about his decision raged for weeks on TV and talk radio, people gradually began to look at the analytics — and realized Belichick had made the right choice.
New England had roughly a 60% chance of getting a first down, which would have ended the game. If Belichick punts and gives Manning the ball back, the Colts have a better-than-even chance of winning. Belichick had added at least 10 percentage points to his chances of victory.
The extended debate won some converts.
Then came the Eagles in the Super Bowl after the 2017 season. They eschewed a field goal try toward the end of the first half on fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line. Instead, the Eagles ran a trick play now known as "the Philly Special," scored a touchdown, and went on to beat the Patriots 41-33. (That play deserves some love: NFL Films described it as "a play that the Eagles had never called before, run on 4th down by an undrafted rookie running back pitching the football to a third-string tight end who had never attempted an NFL pass before, throwing to a backup quarterback who had never caught an NFL (or college) pass before, on the biggest stage for football.")
That play opened even more eyes to the wisdom of going for it on fourth down, and it was followed by more and more attempts and more and more successes. The hot head coaches in the league today include the Commanders' Dan Quinn and the Detroit Lions' Dan Campbell, who are as bold — and successful — as they come. The Eagles, on their way to their third Super Bowl in eight seasons, run a quarterback sneak they call "the Brotherly Shove" that they trust will get them at least a yard anywhere on the field.
Just look at the games over the weekend. While the teams went for it on fourth down 14 times, they punted only seven times and attempted field goals only five times. They succeeded on 10 of the 14 fourth-down attempts and were oh-so-close on two others. If you saw the same game I did, it sure looked like Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen got a first down late in the game against the Chiefs. There just wasn't clear enough evidence to overturn the call on the field. On the final fourth-down attempt, a Bills receiver dropped Allen's desperation pass.
What are the lessons for innovation in insurance?
To me, the biggest is that we should recognize how much tradition can limit us. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to founders of impressive startups and asked who their competitors are and had them respond that they're mostly up against inertia. "This is how we've always done it" should disappear as a justification for an action. That hardly means that we need to change everything overnight, just that inertia can't be a justification for anything.
I've also found that looking for those shocks matters. We can't all have Bill Belichick create a national debate for us that raises awareness of a key issue, but we can look for successes such as the Philly Special and can highlight instructive failures like the one Belichick himself experienced. When we find a good lesson on innovation, we need to communicate it again and again.
In addition, we can follow the probabilities more than we do now. We’re great at doing and trusting the math when it comes to underwriting and claims, but, like most companies in other industries, can be hit-or-miss when it comes to innovation. Especially in this fast-moving AI phase, we need to be disciplined about identifying big opportunities, testing ideas inexpensively, weeding out the losers quickly and scaling the winners. And we need to gauge success on a careful evaluation of whether an effort increased our chances of winning, not simply whether we got a first down or a touchdown. Probabilities did okay for Belichick, and he has six Super Bowl rings to prove it. They can help us do better, too.
The final lesson I'd draw is that innovation is hard. Really hard. So maybe we can cut ourselves some slack for a bit about the pace of change in insurance — right before we get back to work.
Fly, Eagles, fly.
Paul