Ertz was sidelined with a hamstring injury. I think that makes it difficult on guys.''Įagles: S Marcus Epps left in the first half with a concussion. ''We were kind of choppy in the passing game. ''I thought he did some good things for us for the first time,'' Ryan said. Targeted eight times, the rookie from Florida finished with four catches for 31 yards. The answers to the questions are great, but gaining a fundamental understanding about how the sport really works is even better.Tight end Kyle Pitts is expected to be a big part of the offense after the Falcons drafted him with the fourth overall choice. The insights are often the real value of any good model. It's these kinds of complications that are often the first things to be assumed away for the purpose of making the problem directly solvable. In cases where ATL won by playing straight defense, something unfortunate often happened to NO-they got penalized, turned the ball over, or took a loss (which actually occurred). I ran the simulation one "game" at a time and looked at a sample of how the games unfolded. Happily, the WP model yields the same answer with approximately the same results (24.9% and 16.9%).Īnother advantage of the WOPR is that it can provide insights into the reasons for the results. One advantage of a sim model is that you can create as large a sample as you need for almost any situation you can imagine. They are simultaneously very rare and have high leverage on the game outcome. It might be tempting to plug the situation into the (empirical) WP model, but situations like this pose two problems that combine to make things tough. The announcers on Fox raised the question, so I presume it crossed the minds of the ATL staff.) That's a pretty big spread as far as these things go, so the numbers support ATL's approach. In this case, virtual ATL won 25.3% of the time by playing defense and 16.0% of the time by intentionally allowing the TD. And the proportion of times ATL wins starting up 4 points with their backs against the goal line is their win probability estimate for playing straight up defense. For example, the proportion of times the sim says that ATL wins starting at their own 20 down 3 points with 2 timeouts and 1:24 left on the clock is an estimate of their win probability for intentionally allowing the TD. The proportion of times in which a chosen event occurs in the simulation can be an estimate of the probability of that event. Simulation models generally work the same way. Because of the randomness at the core of the technique, they called it Monte Carlo integration.
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By repeating this enough times, they could get increasingly solid estimates for the answer they needed. Direct analytic solutions were impossible, so the scientists developed a method of randomly sampling values within the problem. During the Manhattan project, scientists needed to be able to solve really nasty high-dimension integrals. Who cares who wins a dumb make-believe game?įair point, but here's a cool story. If you're not familiar with how simulation models work, you're probably wondering So what? Dude, I can put my Madden on auto-play and do the same thing.
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Play outcomes are randomly drawn from empirical distributions of actual plays that occurred in similar circumstances. It simulates a game from any starting point, play by play, yard by yard, and second by second. The WOPR is the new game simulation model created this past off-season, designed and calibrated specifically for in-game analytics. There's a lot of what-ifs: What if NO scores on 1st down anyway? What if they don't score on 1st but on 2nd down? On 3rd down? On 4th down? Or what if they throw the ball? What if they stop the clock somehow, or commit a penalty? How likely is a turnover on each successive down? You can see that the situation quickly becomes an almost intractable problem without excessive assumptions. Yet, because NO was on the 1, perhaps the go-ahead score was so likely that ATL would be better off down 3 with the ball than up 4 backed-up against their goal line. In this case NO needed a TD, which-needless to say-makes a big difference. I previously examined intentional touchdown scenarios, but only considered situations when the offense was within 3 points.
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With 2 timeouts left, should ATL have allowed the touchdown intentionally? With about a minute and a half remaining, NO was down by 4 but had a 1st & goal at the 1. I was asked yesterday about the end of regulation of the Saints-Falcons game.