Posts
Yale Coach Tom Williams did. He called a fake punt. The fake gained 15 yards, but that still handed Harvard the ball on the Yale 40-yard line. Harvard scored the game-winning touchdown four snaps later.
Well, gee, fortunately, the Bulldogs "Annual Banquet Provides Closure for 2009 Season". Closure? For a tackle football team nicknamed Bulldogs? What, are they French Bulldogs?
***
On the other hand, LSU was successful on a 4th down play and then they were too stupefied to run a play. With one second their QB tried to down the ball, but that takes at least a second. Game over.
***
Even more about going for it on fourth down from a geeky smarty-pants: Fourth Down : The Frontal Cortex and don't miss Conservative decisions of football coaches: fourth-down conversion and default decisions wherein the author points out that "the conservative strategy of football coaches is a general case of conseratism in decision making that appears in many contexts in the Kahneman-Slovic-Tversky literature." Well, duh.
Beware those heuristic fallacies, my friend.
***
Or see what those darn kids are up to at Heuristic Squelch.
Doug:
ReplyDeleteThe Harvard-Yale game in 1968 produced one of the great newspaper headlines of all time. Down 29-13 in the 4th quarter -- with only 42 seconds left to play -- Harvard improbably rallied to score 16 points, which prompted this headline in the Harvard Crimson: "Harvard beats Yale 29-29"
Phil,
ReplyDeleteI remember reading about that game in Sports Illustrated. There is a documentary movie available on Netflix.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Harvard_Beats_Yale_29-29/70109082?strackid=17a9a53b3ba40b5e_0_srl&strkid=731327383_0_0&trkid=222336
That was way before the day of instant and wall-to-wall highlights on ESPN, let alone You Tube. (To my recollection the first national highlights show was on Monday Night Football at halftime with Howard Cosell.)
My favorite prank at The Game was done by MIT students (they don't have a football team) From Wikipedia: "[D]uring the second quarter in 1982, when a Harvard score was immediately followed by a huge black weather balloon, previously installed under the 45 yard line by students from MIT as the letters painted on its side proclaimed, slowly inflating until it exploded, spraying talcum powder over the field (Harvard won, 45-7)."