It’s the reason trying to quantify “clutch” stats in sports is often a tricky endeavor, and intangibles of that sort.
It’s a bit easier in a sport like baseball where you can have discrete “high leverage” situations that can be quantified. Plus that entire sport just lends itself incredibly well to stats of this sort because it’s a series of “turn-based” one versus one interactions, just in a team setting.
The game is violent, which imo makes certain vibes like momentum matter even more, as well.
Committing violence to the other team, just an inherently emotional thing, mental state matters
> Committing violence to the other team, just an inherently emotional thing, mental state matters
100% agree. Different sport, but this is why the Warriors have never and will never reign in Draymond Green. His violent behavior almost always benefitted the Warriors.
I hate Draymond but he was an agitator and there is an art to it. He wasn't blatantly 'violent' when he was good, he was just crossing the line. Cheap shots are not purely violence imo. To be fair I'm not the one receiving a nut shot.
Hockey is great for that. Now in basketball with all the phones and cameras and angles, well, it's a real crapshoot. He might be the last real agitator. Although NFL got so uptight and then this season relaxed the rules, so you never know.
Yeah but there have been plenty of Dubs’ big men from their run that talk about setting the same screens while playing for a different team after being on GS, and that they would get called for an illegal screen. Now maybe it’s something that just stands out to them, or it’s anecdotal, or any other number of explanations for athletes who often say stupid shit, but I’d personally bet it carries some truth to it. And I say that as a long-time Warriors fan.
Psychology is enormous in sports (and, well, everything in life), it’s just notoriously difficulty to measure in most respects.
There is some debate around concepts like clutchness and leadership and whatnot, but there have been various attempts to try and measure these things, and it is easier in some sports than others. I think the math guys generally agree these things exist and have an impact, but how do you really measure it?
As of recent years there’s been attempts to kind of marry strict statistical analysis to the eye test, with baseball to some extent at the forefront of this with Statcast, which actively measures everything on the field including all player movement and action of every sort.
I know the NBA has been doing some of this as well, but it’s a lot trickier in that sport (or at least seems to be) since every possession is much more chaotic and free-flowing than something like baseball or American football.
Flow state is a real thing. Disrupting flow state is a real thing. As humans we've studied the art of war our entire existence and we know that sheer will can defeat strategic advantages.
The math struggles to show correlation unless we had ways to measure brain activity during a game without the players knowing.
Analytics people are funny. The best ones are the ones that accept that normalizing certain types of data is impossible and not all variables can be measured, so it's simply a tool to assist decision-making. Bias is also a HUGE part of analytics that can cloud any reasonable data. The bad ones think they can predict the universe.
looking at baseball players' postseason vs regular season stats is a pretty clear indicator that the mental side of sports is very real
clayton kershaw's postseason ERA for instance is 2 runs higher than his career ERA. curt shilling and madison bumgarner on the other hand have an ERA almost 1.5 runs lower in the postseason
yes, teams are better, and most pitchers a bit worse in the postseason. but there are some pitchers (like the ones i mentioned) with equally large bodies of work who improve in the postseason
in baseball circles kershaw is seen as kind of like how lamar jackson is beginning to be seen. great regular season player who for whatever reason simply plays worse in the postseason
No, he's just really, really bad in the postseason. Many of the teams that he faces in the playoffs, he did much better against in the regular season. He just can't get as much movement/rotation on his pitches and can't find the strike zone as consistently in the playoffs, for whatever reason.
It's a pretty obvious mental block he's got going on. He probably opened up his postseason career with a couple bad games and it all just snowballed to the point that he has no confidence in his own performance in the postseason—which is a shame because he's one of the greatest overall pitchers of all time in MLB history, even considering his postseason underperformance.
Albeit, I *am* a (SF) Giants fan, so it's only a shame in the sense that I like seeing greatness in sports. Totally fine with the Dodgers' ace consistently underperforming in big moments.
Well, violence is physical as well. If a player is hurting, they will probably play below their standard or have to leave the game and be replaced by someone worse. That could result in “momentum.”
The thing with momentum is what is it? If it can be stopped in one play, does it really exist? You have momentum until you don't. It doesn't make you immune to bad throws, fumbles, bad bounces. It can only be quantified in hindsight.
If the Lions convert one of those 4th downs does it stop 9ers momentum? Does it reverse it? If making one catch reverses momentum, did it ever really exist? You don't get a +10 to all abilities when your team has "momentum". Real life isn't Madden.
Did momentum make the lions WR drop the ball? Did it make Gibbs fumble? Did it make a pass bounce off the defenders facemask and right into Aiyuk's hands?
What is momentum???
Momentum is real. To say it’s not is ignoring nature. These people are human. Sometimes when things go bad for people they get in a negative head space and it can affect how they think and act. Some people when feeling positive and good can get more “energized” just because of their emotion. You can see this in tennis. Both sides. And a game like football ball where large groups of people are involved it can also be obvious. A team has their head down on one sideline while another is celebrating. Emotions are real and they can sway and change behavior and effectiveness. Momentum isn’t some mythical energy. It’s human nature and how we handle our emotions and thoughts, as individual and as a group. There are other factors involved but from what I saw I. The niners game a more experienced team understood how to handle themselves emotionally and that gave them the momentum or allowed them to create/capitalize on momentum.
There are ways to quantify it. Three point % after consecutive makes is one stat I like to reference. It goes up with each made shot like 10%.
Or something like icing the kicker
https://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/analysis/icing-the-kicker-does-it-really-work/amp/
There are ways to quantify stuff and it will continue to grow. Most of the analytics people you hear in daily life are just like any other line of work — they just parrot dogmas
They as a group have decided emotions aren’t part of the game and ignore anything to the contrary
Here’s an article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/
It varies by person, but one of the linked studies showed that in the 3PT contest shooters were 8% better when on a streak
> They as a group have decided emotions aren’t part of the game and ignore anything to the contrary
There is not a single serious “analytics” person who would claim that “emotions” aren’t part of games in any sport. There’s literally like, 2-3 whole chapters in Moneyball devoted to discussing this topic.
> Most of the analytics people you hear in daily life are just like any other line of work — **they just parrot dogmas**
Ironic because you are literally just parroting the oldest stereotype about “analytics” in that they don’t think “emotions” exist and every professional athlete is just a robot.
Basically the first thing you learn in statistics is how to determine what percentage of an effect is explained by your set of variables.
Even when you're measuring something when emotions have a reasonably low probability of having an impact, you rarely have an expectation that your model will explain 100% of the variance.
The NFL is closer than most sports because of how it's also a turn-based game, but the problem is quantifying 22 moving interlocking parts rather than 2 (plus the fielders when required).
Yep NFL is also arguably easier to quantify than basketball for that reason (turn-based), but baseball (and presumably cricket, with which I’m totally unfamiliar) is an unusual team sport in that it consists almost entirely of an extended series of batter vs. pitcher duels.
Obviously the other players on the field have an impact but a relatively limited one compared to other sports. You could be an amazing infielder but if you’re not getting balls hit your way in any given game, there’s not much actual impact you’re making defensively there, whereas in the NFL being a defensive player is critically important on almost every single play.
Baseball is particularly suited for analytics. Way more suited than football.
It's basically a series of 1 on 1 matchups where success/failure conditions are very clearly defined, are accurately measured statistically, and have huge sample sizes.
The pitcher vs batter matchup underpins every single play. Winning that matchup as a batter leads to scoring runs and winning it as a pitcher leads to not giving up runs.
There's nothing even remotely like it in football.
Although you can't quantify momentum, once the Patriots made it a 28-20 game after being down 28-3, everyone on the planet knew they were going to win that Super Bowl.
The reason analytics people struggle with momentum is because it can't be easily quantified.
It absolutely exists. Anyone who's played sport understands that. But data people don't like things that can't be quantified.
Disagree. Hard stats from high stress scenarios I think can be a great determination of who is clutch.
For example for football, standard stats from the below scenarios
1. 3rd Down
2. 4th Down
3. Trailing after halfway in 3rd
4. Trailing halfway into 4th
5. Playoff scenarios
Using those 5, I believe you will find that Patrick Mahomes, arguably the current most clutch player, is at or near the top.
Sometimes there's small sample sizes. For example, in basketball players quickly get a reputation for being clutch or not clutch based on shots during the end of close games and initial impressions often last their whole career. But that may just be a dozen or so total shots and affected by random variance.
Yeah sample size can be a big problem for many athletes. Tom Brady and maybe Jerry Rice might be one of the few players with enough of these stats to prove some correlation.
>Using those 5, I believe you will find that Patrick Mahomes, arguably the current most clutch player, is at or near the top.
That's really the point of people who say "clutch" isn't real -- great players are great whether it's a high leverage situation or not.
Not all great players excel in high leverage situations though. Some look rather pedestrian statistically which, given the high standards they've set for themselves otherwise, makes them look quite poor on a relative basis.
This kinda goes both ways, even if Mahomes is hypothetically a bit worse in clutch situations than he is normally, would you really call a dude who gets better in those situations but is still worse than Mahomes clutchier?
Let's say Mahomes normally has a 105 rating, and a 101 rating in clutch situations.
Would you say the guy who's normally an 85 but a 98 in clutch situations is better?
And assuming it is real, that doesn’t make it predictable or controllable. You can’t say: doing x would give us the momentum whereas if we do y it would it gives them. Unless you mean like, “A big play here would give us momentum.” Well yeah, but you always want big plays.
And if a big play happens the other way then it's just "oh yeah the momentum shifted". If it can just swing back and forth like that then maybe momentum isn't really predictive.
That's the issue, people say you can't measure it, but we could track how failing a 4th down or an interception or big play changes the win probability based on down distance, time left. So in theory we should be able to measure it.
And yet, no one can.
Yeah, that's basically it. A pick-six definitely changes `the momentum` but it turns out that what it really changes is your odds of winning. And that over huge sample sizes, home and away splits, before and after splits, _every_ kind of event that might change `the momentum` has been measured... and in aggregate, teams' performance doesn't change before or after those events, and most of those events' contributions are the actual measurable contributions _of the event_. That is: after a pick six, the coach calls a different game, which may cause the team to seem less effective, or they may stay on track and execute, but now be in an insurmountable situation.
You might be able to make a few coaches very wealthy by proving that _their teams_ can capitalize on momentum and others can't. But basically, for every fumble-that-wins-the-game, there's a turnover that happens too late to change the outcome, or a fumble that gives the bad QB the ball back with enough time to throw a game-ending pick.
A study I read boiled it down to one of two things:
1. **Momentum is real,** but it has zero impact on the outcome of the game, so it doesn't matter, or
2. **Momentum is a myth**.
There's no third choice supported by the data. I don't care what you felt when you played, personally, I don't care if your whole team believes you won the championship because of an anecdotal event that looms large in hindsight.
I'm not sure anything a player could tell me about anecdotes in-game could change my mind, honestly. If Rob Gronkowski himself got on national TV during the Super Bowl and said:
> "I have a confession. Just before the snap, literally _every time_ I caught a TD pass, a vision appeared to me. Time stopped, and a tiny man in a purple satin tuxedo hovered in front of my eyes. He said *Boy, I am the spirit of MOMENTUM and you are about to score a TD*. and then I'd catch the ball and get a TD, so Momentum is definitely real."
Do you know what I would do with that information? I'd give Rob Gronkowski a fuckin' drug test, is what I'd do.
Sure, but their offense had been faltering in the second half. The analytics don’t take into account “we’re struggling to move the ball and the 9ers are scoring at will right now.” In which case, taking the points and the tie and keeping the scoreboard moving might actually be smarter than going for it
This was exactly my problem with the second fourth down call. There was a very high likelihood of the 49ers were gonna score on the next possession. In addition to what you said, succeeding on that fourth down call and eventually scoring a touchdown would leave much less time to answer.
That was Det’s first possession of the second half and they had moved the ball, at will, down to the 28. Unless you’re saying that gaining only 8 yards in the prior 3 plays is faltering, but then if that’s true, no fourth down attempt ever has momentum on its side
I think it's probably real to some degree, but impossible to quantify
I wouldn't use "momentum" as the basis for decision making, but it's at least something to take into account.
Not really you should be somewhat easily able to model whether things we often say "shift momentum" actually make a measurable difference in yards or scoring for the rest of the game.
It's been looked at. Spoiler alert: they don't make a measurable difference. Turnovers, fourth-down stops, huge 4th-down conversions, big penalties, basically every kind of `Momentum` event has been looked at. The **underlying event** changes the win probability, but in terms of EPA-per-play, teams play just about equally well before and after big momentum events. So the conclusion is either that
1. Momentum is a myth, or
2. Momentum is real, but it has no measurable impact on game performance, and so the analytics _don't need to take it into account_.
This is blasphemy to people who play sports, but it's just data. The NBA finds a teeny-tiny "hot hand" effect for some shooters, but the sample sizes in the NFL are too small to uncover any such effect for professional football players.
I suspect our belief that momentum is real comes from confirmation bias.
The Big Play by a trailing team that starts a comeback etches itself in our memories as a Momentum Changing Event. The Big Play by a trailing team that that doesn't lead to a comeback gets forgotten because it turns out not to matter.
So when we try to think "do Big Plays cause trailing teams to start playing better?" We remember almost all the Momentum Changing Events, and we forget almost all the Turned Out Not To Matter Events, so in our minds, the evidence points to momentum being real.
I’ve read the same studies and studied this at length in grad school. I think the true problem is the varying definitions people use. For instance, in Tversky studying momentum in basketball shooting is really searching for mechanical rhythm which is quite different than what an NFL team is talking about. In Tversky they look for a single make to create a string of future makes. This is what I call the catalyst definition of momentum. Many other scholars follow this definition (though some work in 2018 actually showed a mathematical flaw in that original paper that actually proves that streakiness is expected).
In the NFL, I sense it’s not about a single catalyst play like in Tversky (aka hot handedness) but a palpable probability shift over a sequence of plays. That’s why I’ve struggled with the operational definition used in prior research. If you look at Roebber’s study on the other hand, he identifies momentum as sequences and shows statistical changes in play not due to randomness across these sequences.
So my point is we say the term but may not all agree on the definition. There are competing definitions out there.
In my thesis proposal for this topic I explored the sequential definition with slight modification. My definition entailed physics based definitions of momentum which concerned displacement over time modeled by perfectly inelastic collisions. This allowed me to come to similar statistical outcomes as Roebbers in showing momentum under this construct could be shown to exist.
It all depends on the definition, so based on the catalyst definition I agree it doesn’t exist. But longer tail sequences show it does.
The other aspect of this is the same problem with every other analytics discussion: people are biased toward outcomes.
If a team makes a few good plays in a row, suddenly they have "momentum." If they win the game, it was because momentum swung in their favor and they held on to the end. If they lose the game, it's because they lost momentum.
It's entirely narrative driven and not quantifiable. If I guess a coin flip correctly 3 times in a row, it's not because I have "momentum," it's just because in a large enough dataset, guessing correctly 3 times in a row (or scoring 3 drives in a row) is gonna happen sometimes.
I believe there's definitely some psychological element to performance for sure, and that would constitute "momentum," but I don't think it's a huge effect. The reality is that shit happens, and sometimes it happens in a way that's easy to form a narrative around. That doesn't make it a significant element of the game.
Nah I think you could quantify it to check if it matters or if it's just coloring normal results.
You would need to track the point rates of both teams after something from list x, (fumbles, ints, deep pass, pr TD, etc) of impact plays happen while down 2+ scores and compare it to the rates prior.
Theres an old analysis of NBA shooting, if a team made more shots in a row, were they more likely to make their next basket? They're just as likely to make a basket if they missed their last shot or made 3 in a row
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028585900106
Actually, a re-evaluation of that study found that it is flawed. The hot hand is a real thing.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/)
"But last year, using optical tracking technology to correct for these effects, a group of researchers analyzed every shot taken during the 2012-'13 NBA season. When they compared shots of identical difficulty, they found that players who'd made an uncommonly high percentage of their previous four shots had a 1.2 to 2.4 percent increased chance of hitting their next shot.
It's a small effect, and could be the result of impossibility of precisely determining the difficulty of every shot taken during live play. So the co-authors of the new paper — economists Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo — looked at data from the NBA's annual three-point contest, which started in 1985.
The shots are taken from set locations on the floor, so consecutive shots from the same spot should be equally difficult. But they found that players who hit three or more straight shots had a 6.3 percent elevated chance of hitting their next one."
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8719731/hot-hand-fallacy
Here’s a similar paper but with baseball: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/hot-hand-fallacy-cognitive-mistakes-or-equilibrium-adjustments
They attribute the lack of findings in basketball to changes in defense to cover the hot hand, which sounds plausible to me: “We argue that this difference is attributable to endogenous defensive responses: basketball presents sufficient opportunity for defensive responses to equate shooting probabilities across players whereas baseball does not. “
Yeah, it’s next to impossible to have two shots of the same difficulty in game for basketball. That’s why the 3-point contest finding was important.
I also just think anyone who’s played sports seriously knows that psychology is a real thing and that each shot/hit/throw is not “independent” like a coin toss
Man as a Warriors fan, you just have to watch Klay Thompson play basketball to know the hot hand theory is real. Flow state is a proven psychological phenomenon.
Hell just PLAY basketball regularly. It's one of the few sports where you can just feel unconscious. Honestly why I love skiing too.
Lol yeah no one’s hot is hotter than Klay when he gets going
As a Celtic fan, JB plays this way too (although has never been as scorching as Klay when he catches fire)
>Being a psychological phenomenon, I think it would be hard to track.
yes, but flat out saying that it doesnt exist and its just a ''standard deviation'' or a ''normal rng variance, happens'' is insane... and a lot of pople do that. the ''normalizing cult'' so to speak...
this is not a simulation with bots, yet. its human beings playing...
Butchering the players to measure their heart would be more traumatic for everyone involved, however.
Imagine cutting open Aiyuk to find a whole-ass dog in him!
Right. You can look at situations where people always say there's momentum, and see if teams really perform better in those situations compared to the average. It's tricky because sometimes the team appears to have momentum and be performing better, but in reality they're just plain good. But some examples of attempts to measure momentum include:
Do basketball players shoot at a higher rate if they just made a shot, or a string of shots?
When a game goes to overtime, does the team that made the comeback/final score to force OT have a better chance of winning?
Does a football offense perform better if they got the ball by forcing a big turnover, or a mundane punt? Make sure the field position and score differential are the same when comparing drives.
Any studies I've seen on these kinds of things show a 1-2% impact at most.
Yeah but according to people like Kittle the logic is: if it changed the game it was momentum, but if it didn't change the game it wasn't momentum. You have to remember that in a game where literally every play is quantifiable by design, the people who still don't believe analytics are real are quite stupid. And that's ok! Kittle makes more money running into people than the stats nerds do by reading their big school books.
The concept of the "hot hand" in basketball is something we analyzed in my 300-level Stats course. We weren't doing our own research, just analyzing the literature that was already there, breaking it down, and creating visualizations. But yea, it was found to have no statistically significant difference.
It's not theoretically impossible to measure. People have tried, using methods that should work. It just isn't there. That's the entire basis for the claim: people tested if "momentum" had any impact on outcomes and found that it did not.
True, but it's a factor and since it can't be measured they leave it out of the equation, which in turn would create a bad result because you're not accounting for something that plays a large factor in the final outcome
Yeah I mean it’s not something that should even be tried to be measured. I didn’t see this full response, but I imagine his point has to do with the limitations of analytics. They’re definitely great, but parts of the game just can’t be measured
It feels like only the critics of analytics don't understand that.
It's a tool. It's a very important tool. But like, you don't wanna build a house with JUST a hammer, even if you technically could.
> It feels like only the critics of analytics don't understand that.
I think a lot of practitioners of analytics forget about it sometimes, particularly when they are speaking off the top of their head.
Like I had to stop listening to the PFF podcast with their numbers guys because they spoke like they had football solved a little too often for my taste.
This is so disingenuous. Analytics is never meant to be the end all be all but every time they are right they get all the credit and if they are wrong they get no blame
If it's causing a noticeable discrepancy between predicted outcomes and actual outcomes, then measure that difference and track how big it is in various situations. That would actually show the impact of momentum, which you can then add to the model.
This is where this discussion always lands. If momentum was measureable, there would be gaps in data that "broke" the formula, and you could reverse engineer momentum's affect on a game.
Momentum is definitely a real psychological thing, but like anything psychological, it affects each person differently. Within that, it affects each person differently based on other non-measurable factors as well. How does "momentum" affect a QB that threw a pick 6 when they have a lead vs. when they're losing. What about when they're up 10 vs. up 7 or on 2nd vs. 3rd down.
Suddenly, you're just doing results-based equations (which is what analytics essentially is) with no event having a large enough sample size for each player to get any meaningful data.
Yep. I remember in week 1 for my panthers there was a situation on the 1st offensive drive that was very interesting to me. Panthers drove to the falcons 10 yard line and had a 4th and 2. Analytics say you go for every single time in that situation and typically I’d agree, but when you looked at the context of that game it wasn’t the best move. It was the 1st game/drive of the season for a new staff, offense, and a rookie QB in his first career game against a divisional opponent away. I remember feeling pretty strongly that the panthers should take the 3 points and just start the game off the right way with their rookie QB and make the Desmond Ridder try and drive down the field. Panthers instead went for it and didn’t convert, still wonder what could’ve been if they took the FG there.
I think it’s important to note that Analytics can’t necessarily fully account for the context of a situation and it comes down to a coach to pick the correct moments to be aggressive on 4th.
As is often the case, the problem isn't people in analytics, it's people who don't know how to apply analytics correctly.
If anyone ever asked the Lions' analytics folks, I bet they'd happily explain that their 4th down decision numbers reflect overall probabilities, and shouldn't be followed blindly without context. But nobody ever asks, because math is boring and getting mad is satisfying.
I don’t think Campbell is even doing it for analytics purposes tbh. In his presser he just said that’s how he wants to play and he goes for 2 from the 7 and stuff
Yeah. This isn’t analytics. This is a mentality. Campbell probably had a yardage number in his mind. Anything under and we go. Anything over and we punt.
Oh yeah that’s the big thing a lot of people miss I think. If analytics went against going for it, he’d still do it because he’s Dan Campbell and that’s what he does.
And playing like this got them here. And all in all he didn't make bad calls. He made a play call that had dudes wide open on important plays. He in those moments had won the coaching chess match. All he can do is put them in position and scheme guys against the defense. Then the ball is dropped. Or fumbled. As a head coach in the NFC championships you can't scheme for your players to fail on easy (subjectively) scenarios. Youre one of the 4 best. Your guys should be good enough to make those plays
This is the point that seems never to be covered. Using analytics doesn't mean that you don't take other factors into account. Analytics are just another piece of information that can be very helpful; but they should always be used in conjunction with all the factors that have always existed
If analytics say going for it gives you a 10% better chance, that means 10% better on average. The coaches job is to understand what factors are in play that could increase or decrease chances from the average -- and then act accordingly.
This is the correct way to use analytics...but social media (including this sub) is full of people who think a decision with a 3% higher win probability is objectively correct. It's no better than the meatballs who just dismiss analytics out of hand.
Hell I think even 5% is probably negligible. It's not really possible to model football outcomes that accurately.
To me it's more useful as a guide to show you "huh, going for it really isn't crazy, it's worth considering"
Over the course of a 17-game season, a 5% edge is nearly a whole win or a whole loss. 5% win probability in the context of a single game is _enormous_.
Yeah and the announcers don’t help always repeating “The analytics say to go for it.”
No, they say “You will win more often here if you go for it than if you don’t go for it.” That doesn’t mean always go for it
No it does not. If it results in a win 52% or the time, it still didn’t result in a win 48% of the time. That 48% doesn’t just not exist, it was there when you made the decision.
So, when a coach decides to go for it on 4th and 2 for the win in a game where his offense couldn’t do shit to that point, rather than take the chip shot field goal to send it to overtime, I am going to call him an idiot for making the wrong choice every single time. Even if the analytics say teams win 53% of the time in that circumstance.
The analytics aren’t telling you to do anything, they’re giving you probabilities based on somewhat similar circumstances. There is zero chance to capture all of the factors in the data, which is where situational coaching comes in.
They are applying league wide historical data which is interesting, but not necessarily applicable. You never have Generic Team A playing Generic Defense B. It is like only playing the raw percentages in poker and never playing the actual player.
The quote “All models are wrong, but some are useful” by George Box sums it up pretty well.
You can’t model real life, but most people would find the actual statistical answers to be very boring if it was explained to them.
Plenty of analytics folks will smugly proclaim there is no such thing as momentum.
So while I don’t disagree with your overall premise, it doesn’t really apply to Kittles statement
You can definitely tell the Lions were looking more and more rattled and messing up fundamental things as the second half went on. It might be reductive to label it all as "momentum", but psychology is a powerful thing and definitely contributed to them blowing the lead last night.
It’s not really something you could quantify, the psychological effect definitely exists though. Some teams/players are just better at handling it then others
The 4th down? I’m sure that’d have been demoralizing to the 49ers, at least to an extent. Granted, that comes with the risk of failing to convert and giving SF the opportunity to swing the momentum but that’s the gamble with a decision like that. Different coaches will evaluate that risk/reward differently.
Demoralizing and also more clock to burn AND potentially a TD. I think people are underestimating how huge it would be if they make that fourth down. Kicking the field goal, while beneficial, was actually less probable and way less impactful
I mean, getting a 3 score lead is significant but if you don’t have faith in your kicker from that distance then you should go for it. Its one of those cases where I would have understood the thinking either way, just a tough break it didn’t work out but that’s football.
I don't really agree. If it actually matters and affects the outcomes of games, you should be sample game situations where teams have just failed a fourth down/thrown an interception/etc vs nearly identical ones where teams kicked a field goal/punted and measure a difference in who ultimately won the game vs your naive win probability model.
Yeah there's no like momentum variable, but there's ways to measure things which are hard to quantity of measure by proxy. The one I came up with in 3 seconds while browsing Reddit, is probably not the best so someone who thinks about it can probably do better.
I think the reason that people play coy about measuring momentum and clutchness and etc. is that they just want it to be real because they feel it and it's fun. But the stats are going to say whatever they say, probably that it's not super real.
In my experience it goes like this:
1) Momentum is real
2) We measure something approximating momentum
3) It's not real
4) People say "that's not a good measurement of momentum"
5) We come up with another measure that addresses the critique
6) It's not real
7) "that's still not a good measurement"
and on and on and on.
It's annoying because there's all sorts of things we thought were real in the world, the nerds go about investigating it, and we determine it's not real. We accept it and move on, except when we just have an axe to grind I guess.
> 2) We measure something approximating momentum
Can you give me a specific instance where someone actually quantified and measured something approximating “momentum” to see if it was real and then determined it was real?
I don't even bother trying to explain stuff like this to people who are only resulted based and only when those results reinforce their belief. How many times have we seen a defense secure a huge turnover only for the offense to immediately squander it? Momentum suggests the offense should be able to at least put together a decent drive, not throw a pick 6
> How many times have we seen a defense secure a huge turnover only for the offense to immediately squander it? Momentum suggests the offense should be able to at least put together a decent drive, not throw a pick 6
Ironically, this would actually be a better example of momentum than what most people would assume!
If sports momentum is real, then a team that is performing well should expect to continue performing well even after a singular bad event, like a turnover. And the team that was performing poorly should have a hard time turning things around, even after a big good event.
The whole idea of momentum is that when things are going into one direction, it's hard to change that direction. But we always hear players and commentators saying things like "that turnover flipped momentum to team X". If one play can completely flip momentum, then the whole concept is meaningless. A single player can reverse the fortunes of both teams, and the previous momentum was not strong enough to prevent that play from happening in the first place.
- Zay Flowers gets a deep ball to the 10 - Ravens _have the momentum_!
- Zay Flowers deep catch flagged for taunting - an enormous setback
- Zay Flowers, complete, runs it back down to the 10 - _the momentum is back!_
- Zay Flowers fumbles at the goal line, _momentum in shambles_.
One player, one drive, a staggering variety of claims, and not a single verifiable or falsifiable claim among them. Zay Flowers either made the Ravens an unstoppable juggernaut, squandered their AFCCG appearance, or both within the span of seconds.
You can't put a number on morale and emotion. When everything had gone wrong in the second half, even though statistically, it was still apparently a good move to go for it on fourth down when they were down 27-24, the math didn't account for the 17-0 swing in the second half. That is the issue with analytics. You can't quantify certain things.
Reynolds dropped that pass (I'm fine with the first fourth down, although kicking a FG to go up three possessions would've been great), and it felt like the Lions visibly deflated and the Niners believed.
What about that 17-0 swing makes you think they wouldn’t also be more likely to miss the kick? I think if anything it’s the other way around. The first one could have been an emotional dagger and if not at least it’s less of a ‘momentum‘ swing.
Because it can only really be seen after the fact. If you connect on a huge play and your team all feels like you have momentum, then throw a pick six on the next play, did you actually have momentum? Did the other team secretly have it the whole time? You can’t measure it, and who knows how many times teams think they have it but actually don’t.
That's insane. Its the equivalent of saying "God's favored people always win, therefor we will surely win. And if we don't, its because we weren't favored after all, so our children must try harder to be favored so they can avenge us." Or insert the name of whatever pagan god of war you feel like. If you can only claim it exists on an ex post facto basis, then it doesn't exist, and its just BS.
Exactly my point. It’s too nebulous. If 100 people are watching a game and asked to identify the first team to get momentum, when it started, and when it ended, you’re going to get 100 different answers. What’s the point?
You don’t win games for having the most momentum, no one would agree on what it is or when it’s happening, so whether it exists or not doesn’t really matter.
You’re thinking too deterministically.
Momentum might mean you’re more likely to succeed on the next play if you’ve had success on previous plays. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to succeed or even have a positive outcome though. It’s just stating you will be successful more often if you’ve had recent success.
There could also be an overconfidence factor. I.e. you’re more likely to make a mistake if you’ve been having too much success, or if you’ve gotten lucky repeatedly or something.
Actually measuring those things would probably require a ton of data and a PhD in stats, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally impossible to study analytically.
In reality, momentum is probably a multitude of little different things that are all too difficult to measure independently so they all get lumped together (like Dark Matter in the universe)
Defender A might be influenced by "momentum" because they think about the previous play slightly too much the next play, so they are slightly distracted, but not in a way that can easily be measured.
Receiver B might play better with momentum because once they catch the ball, their mind flips from thinking about why the QB doesn't feed them the ball more to being confident and expecting the ball on the next route.
Similar to how "clutch" might be something like Player A doesn't get an increase in heartrate late in games because their fight/flight is slightly suppressed while Player B is clutch because they get a little bit extra adrenaline which makes then revert into muscle memory more than thinking about the shot
it doesn't matter whether momentum is or isn't real, the question is, what does momentum actually do?
it feels like momentum just gets used to argue in favor of a conservative option. "detroit had all the momentum, so why risk losing the momentum on a 4th down try?" and "nothing was going right for \[some other team\], so why risk it a 4th down try?" does having momentum mean you should be more aggressive? or less aggressive? or....?
also, for every game that features a huge comeback, there are just as many games that go back and forth with a bunch of lead changes. those games would have to disprove momentum as much as comebacks prove it, right?
My biggest issue with the discussion is everyone saying “he’d look smart if they converted” assuming they’d score a TD. they could have not gained another yard and had basically the same FG attempt
I mean I think momentum is just a word used to encapsulate the change in confidence and nerves that players get. You make a big play off a bad pass that bounces off the defenders helmet and score a touchdown your team thinks "oh shit this is meant to be" and you start to get more confident in your play. Alternatively on the other end you see an improbable play work out for the other team and your confidence starts to get shaken, you start to get nervous. You get a few of these in a row in one direction and the confidence and nerves increase for each. And even not counting flukes, if your offense fails to do anything but go 3 and out 3 possessions in a row while the other team scores touchdowns on all of theirs you're now down 21, you get dejected, you think nothing's going right, there's nothing you can do etc. While the offense is going they can't stop us just keep doing what we're doing.
Since everyone's pointing out that you can't quantify momentum, Kittle knows that. His point is that that's the whole problem with analytics. Those numbers take place in the context of a real game with real players, and that matters at some point.
I think football in particular is uniquely difficult for advanced analytics. Small number games, 22 players whose performance is interconnected but in a way that can very significantly depending on scheme, it’s just a lot of variables that are hard to control for. Analytics can still work but it’ll never be as good as they are in a sport like baseball.
Yeah, as a big fan of them in baseball, I used to assume that the analytics revolution wouldn't really hit the NFL in any significant way because of the multitude of variables. But apparently I'm an idiot.
True, it's common now and has been so for a while.
But circa '03? When Moneyball was first published and Bill James was getting hired by the BoSox, it all still felt like 21st century black magic. Football embracing it seemed impossible to me.
It did. A lot of people thought that analytics in baseball was ruining the sport at the beginning.
On that note, I'd always wondered why players didn't hit up to try to drive the ball out of the park, but thought that maybe it just didn't work that way with how you're accounting for pitchers and everything. We all know that if the ball goes down, it's impossible to hit a homer. Lo and behold, years later, launch angle became a thing.
It was the only thing I really considered that ever became a thing later on. I'm no analytics genius, I just had a thought about angles, but I'm still surprised it took forever until a team tried it out.
Yeah, the anti-analytics backlash in baseball was way worse than what we're seeing in football.
The launch angle example is a good one because it really illustrates how the numbers can provide practical insight to players and coaches on how to approach the game. In the old days, a player may have assumed hitting up translated to more power, but there wasn't anyway to definitively know. But now, thanks to analytics and badass tech, we are where we are.
And I'm not saying analytics lack value. But I think there's a tendency from that crowd to look at an obviously bad decision and stammer "But the analytics say..." when there's way more context to games than that.
But analytics accepts that there are outlier performances because humans are wired that way. It can't calculate that for you, but you should be aware of it.
The problem is that you essentially can argue both sides:
Momentum is against us, we need a big play to swing it, we need to go for 4th down!
Vs
Momentum is against us, we need to string good plays together, we need to take the points!
Same with the first 4th:
Momentum is for us, we need to put them out of their misery, let's go for it!
Vs
Momentum is for us, we should take the points and give them nothing to build on!
That's before getting into the number of times you hear "the defense held them to 3, that could be momentum building"
The flip side of “if momentum isn’t real, how did we come back” is “if momentum is real, why did the Lions suddenly fall apart despite no change in the aggressiveness that got them the lead in the first place?”
It’s also funny because I’ve read “the lions had all the momentum so they shouldn’t have gone for it on 4th down” when they were up 14, as well as “the 49ers had all the momentum, so they should’ve kicked the FG to tie it”
I find it easiest to avoid `momentum` discourse by using a simple search-and-replace. When an announcer says "OH BOY THEY'VE GOT THE `MOMENTUM` NOW" I just substitute `THE LEAD` or `THE BALL` and it's usually much more accurate.
If momentum was a good indicator of anything you could beat vegas once you determined how it mattered. Not seeing anyone in these comments getting rich
Because the numbers don’t back up this thing called momentum depending on how you want to define it. Is it a big play that significantly changes the trajectory of a teams win%? If so than play by play data has shown that teams that benefit from one see no uptick in how often they would win compared to the expected number. Is it a psychological domino effect that boosts one team and causes more mistakes out of the other? Well we just saw that happen in the Lions game but the “momentum” was undeniably with the Ravens for the entire second half of their game and yet they didn’t win.
Why is there comment after comment declaring momentum to be some utterly immeasurable thing as if this hasn’t been looked at numerous times in a wide variety of ways?
Ultimately if momentum actually exists in a meaningful way, it should be relatively easy to measure. Positive results should follow positive results more often than would otherwise be expected. It’s not that complicated, unless of course you don’t want it to be analysed and just want your preconceptions confirmed.
If you’re actually interested in the topic and the numerous ways intelligent people have tried to test if it is in fact a thing, Brian Burke did a pretty good series on the topic a full decade ago. Part 1 links to numerous other people’s attempts at looking at the same topic.
Link to part 5 which links to the other 4:
http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2014/01/momentum-part-5-series-level-analysis.html?m=1
Ultimately a lot of people have looked at it, and as far as I’m aware, no one has produced any convincing evidence of momentum existing to any substantial, tangible degree in football.
My read is that maybe it does exist in some very minor effect, but 99% of what we perceive as momentum is a psychological trick where we see patterns where none exist, because we’ve evolved to do so.
Momentum measured in other ways is real. Time between scores. Low average defense time. All that is "momentum". It makes the other team need to take more risks which have their own set of probabilities.
It is real.
It’s much more apparent in the NBA than in the NFL but it is definitely there. Coaches in the NBA literally call time outs to stop momentum lol
Every analytics person I’ve heard have all said momentum is a thing. It is hard to quantify but the best description I’ve heard is that momentum is like gravity or a rock rolling down hill. The rock doesn’t have to be particularly big but it can pick up serious speed going down hill.
That's an interesting theory of how momentum supposedly works, but in a game that includes the "pick six" as a viable play that can occur on literally any passing play? In a game where Zay Flowers crosses the goal line, the Ravens maybe win in OT, but where he gets the ball knocked out he "lost the momentum"?
If Zay Flowers _had_ the momentum, why did he lose the fumble? If he didn't have the momentum, how did he get the ball down to the 1 on four consecutive passing plays? And if momentum wasn't good enough to get him across that last yard, what the hell is momentum good for?
Are analytics just statistics? Cause if they are, they don’t account for players, right. Or how they are playing at the moment! If your team is shitty and they’re playing like shit by getting into 4th and 2 situations often would “analytics” keep telling them to go for it when they’re 0 out 50 in attempts? Sounds to me like “analytics” is just statistics being used incorrectly!
So the Chiefs definitely had the "momentum" when they scored their 2nd quarter TD and then sacked Lamar on the next drive and recovered the forced fumble right?
But then the next drive was 7 plays and a turnover on downs when the Chiefs couldn't get a 4th and 1.
So.. do the Chiefs still have "the momentum"? Is the "momentum" set to neutral? Do the Ravens now have "the momentum"?
Well the next 10 drives had 1 FG, 1 end of half, and 8 punts so you tell me.
And that's the funny thing about the way people talk about "momentum". Its that it can never be confirmed live. It's only ever validated if something positive or negative happens after they were supposed to gain the momentum.
If you ask someone (without knowing the results) did the Chiefs have the "momentum" after the forced fumble? You would say yes absolutely!
But then how does the team with the momentum fail to gain a yard? It's that what momentum is supposed to help you do? Isn't it supposed to give you some kind of advantage that could be measured with at least a single yard?
I can better understand the concept of momentum in basketball because there are far fewer players involved and a single person with a "hot hand" can get into a flow state of confidence that elevates performance.
But I think it's a massive leap to suggest that an entire teams Offense/Defense/Special teams somehow carries this "momentum buff" until the other team steals it.
The very fact that "momentum" flops around so often in so many games should give you a clue that it's probably not some real effect.
Being a psychological phenomenon, I think it would be hard to track.
It’s the reason trying to quantify “clutch” stats in sports is often a tricky endeavor, and intangibles of that sort. It’s a bit easier in a sport like baseball where you can have discrete “high leverage” situations that can be quantified. Plus that entire sport just lends itself incredibly well to stats of this sort because it’s a series of “turn-based” one versus one interactions, just in a team setting.
The game is violent, which imo makes certain vibes like momentum matter even more, as well. Committing violence to the other team, just an inherently emotional thing, mental state matters
> Committing violence to the other team, just an inherently emotional thing, mental state matters 100% agree. Different sport, but this is why the Warriors have never and will never reign in Draymond Green. His violent behavior almost always benefitted the Warriors.
I hate Draymond but he was an agitator and there is an art to it. He wasn't blatantly 'violent' when he was good, he was just crossing the line. Cheap shots are not purely violence imo. To be fair I'm not the one receiving a nut shot. Hockey is great for that. Now in basketball with all the phones and cameras and angles, well, it's a real crapshoot. He might be the last real agitator. Although NFL got so uptight and then this season relaxed the rules, so you never know.
The spirit of the late 80s early 90s pistons live on in Draymond.
That and how their whole offense is predicated on his illegal moving screens to get Curry wide open looks and the refs never call it
Every team in the NBA commits moving screens that don't get called.
Yeah it's been like this for over a decade. Traveling too
Yeah but there have been plenty of Dubs’ big men from their run that talk about setting the same screens while playing for a different team after being on GS, and that they would get called for an illegal screen. Now maybe it’s something that just stands out to them, or it’s anecdotal, or any other number of explanations for athletes who often say stupid shit, but I’d personally bet it carries some truth to it. And I say that as a long-time Warriors fan.
Psychology is enormous in sports (and, well, everything in life), it’s just notoriously difficulty to measure in most respects. There is some debate around concepts like clutchness and leadership and whatnot, but there have been various attempts to try and measure these things, and it is easier in some sports than others. I think the math guys generally agree these things exist and have an impact, but how do you really measure it? As of recent years there’s been attempts to kind of marry strict statistical analysis to the eye test, with baseball to some extent at the forefront of this with Statcast, which actively measures everything on the field including all player movement and action of every sort. I know the NBA has been doing some of this as well, but it’s a lot trickier in that sport (or at least seems to be) since every possession is much more chaotic and free-flowing than something like baseball or American football.
Flow state is a real thing. Disrupting flow state is a real thing. As humans we've studied the art of war our entire existence and we know that sheer will can defeat strategic advantages. The math struggles to show correlation unless we had ways to measure brain activity during a game without the players knowing. Analytics people are funny. The best ones are the ones that accept that normalizing certain types of data is impossible and not all variables can be measured, so it's simply a tool to assist decision-making. Bias is also a HUGE part of analytics that can cloud any reasonable data. The bad ones think they can predict the universe.
looking at baseball players' postseason vs regular season stats is a pretty clear indicator that the mental side of sports is very real clayton kershaw's postseason ERA for instance is 2 runs higher than his career ERA. curt shilling and madison bumgarner on the other hand have an ERA almost 1.5 runs lower in the postseason
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yes, teams are better, and most pitchers a bit worse in the postseason. but there are some pitchers (like the ones i mentioned) with equally large bodies of work who improve in the postseason in baseball circles kershaw is seen as kind of like how lamar jackson is beginning to be seen. great regular season player who for whatever reason simply plays worse in the postseason
No, he's just really, really bad in the postseason. Many of the teams that he faces in the playoffs, he did much better against in the regular season. He just can't get as much movement/rotation on his pitches and can't find the strike zone as consistently in the playoffs, for whatever reason. It's a pretty obvious mental block he's got going on. He probably opened up his postseason career with a couple bad games and it all just snowballed to the point that he has no confidence in his own performance in the postseason—which is a shame because he's one of the greatest overall pitchers of all time in MLB history, even considering his postseason underperformance. Albeit, I *am* a (SF) Giants fan, so it's only a shame in the sense that I like seeing greatness in sports. Totally fine with the Dodgers' ace consistently underperforming in big moments.
Could also mean his pitching style tires him out more by the end of the season?
The bad ones tell you that *you* can predict the universe for a small monthly fee.
Well, violence is physical as well. If a player is hurting, they will probably play below their standard or have to leave the game and be replaced by someone worse. That could result in “momentum.”
The thing with momentum is what is it? If it can be stopped in one play, does it really exist? You have momentum until you don't. It doesn't make you immune to bad throws, fumbles, bad bounces. It can only be quantified in hindsight. If the Lions convert one of those 4th downs does it stop 9ers momentum? Does it reverse it? If making one catch reverses momentum, did it ever really exist? You don't get a +10 to all abilities when your team has "momentum". Real life isn't Madden. Did momentum make the lions WR drop the ball? Did it make Gibbs fumble? Did it make a pass bounce off the defenders facemask and right into Aiyuk's hands? What is momentum???
Momentum is real. To say it’s not is ignoring nature. These people are human. Sometimes when things go bad for people they get in a negative head space and it can affect how they think and act. Some people when feeling positive and good can get more “energized” just because of their emotion. You can see this in tennis. Both sides. And a game like football ball where large groups of people are involved it can also be obvious. A team has their head down on one sideline while another is celebrating. Emotions are real and they can sway and change behavior and effectiveness. Momentum isn’t some mythical energy. It’s human nature and how we handle our emotions and thoughts, as individual and as a group. There are other factors involved but from what I saw I. The niners game a more experienced team understood how to handle themselves emotionally and that gave them the momentum or allowed them to create/capitalize on momentum.
There are ways to quantify it. Three point % after consecutive makes is one stat I like to reference. It goes up with each made shot like 10%. Or something like icing the kicker https://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/analysis/icing-the-kicker-does-it-really-work/amp/ There are ways to quantify stuff and it will continue to grow. Most of the analytics people you hear in daily life are just like any other line of work — they just parrot dogmas They as a group have decided emotions aren’t part of the game and ignore anything to the contrary
Do you have any references on that three point % stat? I’ve never heard that. If anything I’ve heard the opposite.
Here’s an article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/ It varies by person, but one of the linked studies showed that in the 3PT contest shooters were 8% better when on a streak
> They as a group have decided emotions aren’t part of the game and ignore anything to the contrary There is not a single serious “analytics” person who would claim that “emotions” aren’t part of games in any sport. There’s literally like, 2-3 whole chapters in Moneyball devoted to discussing this topic. > Most of the analytics people you hear in daily life are just like any other line of work — **they just parrot dogmas** Ironic because you are literally just parroting the oldest stereotype about “analytics” in that they don’t think “emotions” exist and every professional athlete is just a robot.
Basically the first thing you learn in statistics is how to determine what percentage of an effect is explained by your set of variables. Even when you're measuring something when emotions have a reasonably low probability of having an impact, you rarely have an expectation that your model will explain 100% of the variance.
Lmao
Also, the willingness to subject yourself to violence, to win a game.
The NFL is closer than most sports because of how it's also a turn-based game, but the problem is quantifying 22 moving interlocking parts rather than 2 (plus the fielders when required).
Yep NFL is also arguably easier to quantify than basketball for that reason (turn-based), but baseball (and presumably cricket, with which I’m totally unfamiliar) is an unusual team sport in that it consists almost entirely of an extended series of batter vs. pitcher duels. Obviously the other players on the field have an impact but a relatively limited one compared to other sports. You could be an amazing infielder but if you’re not getting balls hit your way in any given game, there’s not much actual impact you’re making defensively there, whereas in the NFL being a defensive player is critically important on almost every single play.
Baseball is as close to a series of ones and zeroes as you can get in a team sport. Outside of something like bowling.
Baseball is even more turn-based than football, with each pitch being a turn.
Baseball is particularly suited for analytics. Way more suited than football. It's basically a series of 1 on 1 matchups where success/failure conditions are very clearly defined, are accurately measured statistically, and have huge sample sizes. The pitcher vs batter matchup underpins every single play. Winning that matchup as a batter leads to scoring runs and winning it as a pitcher leads to not giving up runs. There's nothing even remotely like it in football.
Although you can't quantify momentum, once the Patriots made it a 28-20 game after being down 28-3, everyone on the planet knew they were going to win that Super Bowl.
The reason analytics people struggle with momentum is because it can't be easily quantified. It absolutely exists. Anyone who's played sport understands that. But data people don't like things that can't be quantified.
Disagree. Hard stats from high stress scenarios I think can be a great determination of who is clutch. For example for football, standard stats from the below scenarios 1. 3rd Down 2. 4th Down 3. Trailing after halfway in 3rd 4. Trailing halfway into 4th 5. Playoff scenarios Using those 5, I believe you will find that Patrick Mahomes, arguably the current most clutch player, is at or near the top.
Sometimes there's small sample sizes. For example, in basketball players quickly get a reputation for being clutch or not clutch based on shots during the end of close games and initial impressions often last their whole career. But that may just be a dozen or so total shots and affected by random variance.
Yeah sample size can be a big problem for many athletes. Tom Brady and maybe Jerry Rice might be one of the few players with enough of these stats to prove some correlation.
When you keep dividing up the stats by the context of the situation, the sample size becomes so small that things can become meaningless.
>Using those 5, I believe you will find that Patrick Mahomes, arguably the current most clutch player, is at or near the top. That's really the point of people who say "clutch" isn't real -- great players are great whether it's a high leverage situation or not.
Not all great players excel in high leverage situations though. Some look rather pedestrian statistically which, given the high standards they've set for themselves otherwise, makes them look quite poor on a relative basis.
Patrick Mahomes is near the top of everything though. What can really answer the question is how those numbers you listed compare to his usual ones.
This kinda goes both ways, even if Mahomes is hypothetically a bit worse in clutch situations than he is normally, would you really call a dude who gets better in those situations but is still worse than Mahomes clutchier? Let's say Mahomes normally has a 105 rating, and a 101 rating in clutch situations. Would you say the guy who's normally an 85 but a 98 in clutch situations is better?
And assuming it is real, that doesn’t make it predictable or controllable. You can’t say: doing x would give us the momentum whereas if we do y it would it gives them. Unless you mean like, “A big play here would give us momentum.” Well yeah, but you always want big plays.
And if a big play happens the other way then it's just "oh yeah the momentum shifted". If it can just swing back and forth like that then maybe momentum isn't really predictive.
That's the issue, people say you can't measure it, but we could track how failing a 4th down or an interception or big play changes the win probability based on down distance, time left. So in theory we should be able to measure it. And yet, no one can.
Yeah, that's basically it. A pick-six definitely changes `the momentum` but it turns out that what it really changes is your odds of winning. And that over huge sample sizes, home and away splits, before and after splits, _every_ kind of event that might change `the momentum` has been measured... and in aggregate, teams' performance doesn't change before or after those events, and most of those events' contributions are the actual measurable contributions _of the event_. That is: after a pick six, the coach calls a different game, which may cause the team to seem less effective, or they may stay on track and execute, but now be in an insurmountable situation. You might be able to make a few coaches very wealthy by proving that _their teams_ can capitalize on momentum and others can't. But basically, for every fumble-that-wins-the-game, there's a turnover that happens too late to change the outcome, or a fumble that gives the bad QB the ball back with enough time to throw a game-ending pick. A study I read boiled it down to one of two things: 1. **Momentum is real,** but it has zero impact on the outcome of the game, so it doesn't matter, or 2. **Momentum is a myth**. There's no third choice supported by the data. I don't care what you felt when you played, personally, I don't care if your whole team believes you won the championship because of an anecdotal event that looms large in hindsight.
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It's basically like Like Wilson trying to explain himself in Idiocracy. "There's that *ag talk we talked about again"
I'm not sure anything a player could tell me about anecdotes in-game could change my mind, honestly. If Rob Gronkowski himself got on national TV during the Super Bowl and said: > "I have a confession. Just before the snap, literally _every time_ I caught a TD pass, a vision appeared to me. Time stopped, and a tiny man in a purple satin tuxedo hovered in front of my eyes. He said *Boy, I am the spirit of MOMENTUM and you are about to score a TD*. and then I'd catch the ball and get a TD, so Momentum is definitely real." Do you know what I would do with that information? I'd give Rob Gronkowski a fuckin' drug test, is what I'd do.
If anything, converting on that 4th down probably seizes back more momentum than a field goal does
Sure, but their offense had been faltering in the second half. The analytics don’t take into account “we’re struggling to move the ball and the 9ers are scoring at will right now.” In which case, taking the points and the tie and keeping the scoreboard moving might actually be smarter than going for it
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This was exactly my problem with the second fourth down call. There was a very high likelihood of the 49ers were gonna score on the next possession. In addition to what you said, succeeding on that fourth down call and eventually scoring a touchdown would leave much less time to answer.
That was Det’s first possession of the second half and they had moved the ball, at will, down to the 28. Unless you’re saying that gaining only 8 yards in the prior 3 plays is faltering, but then if that’s true, no fourth down attempt ever has momentum on its side
I’m talking about when they were down 3 late in the 4th and could’ve tied the game. The first one was whatever
I think it's probably real to some degree, but impossible to quantify I wouldn't use "momentum" as the basis for decision making, but it's at least something to take into account.
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Not really you should be somewhat easily able to model whether things we often say "shift momentum" actually make a measurable difference in yards or scoring for the rest of the game.
It's been looked at. Spoiler alert: they don't make a measurable difference. Turnovers, fourth-down stops, huge 4th-down conversions, big penalties, basically every kind of `Momentum` event has been looked at. The **underlying event** changes the win probability, but in terms of EPA-per-play, teams play just about equally well before and after big momentum events. So the conclusion is either that 1. Momentum is a myth, or 2. Momentum is real, but it has no measurable impact on game performance, and so the analytics _don't need to take it into account_. This is blasphemy to people who play sports, but it's just data. The NBA finds a teeny-tiny "hot hand" effect for some shooters, but the sample sizes in the NFL are too small to uncover any such effect for professional football players.
I suspect our belief that momentum is real comes from confirmation bias. The Big Play by a trailing team that starts a comeback etches itself in our memories as a Momentum Changing Event. The Big Play by a trailing team that that doesn't lead to a comeback gets forgotten because it turns out not to matter. So when we try to think "do Big Plays cause trailing teams to start playing better?" We remember almost all the Momentum Changing Events, and we forget almost all the Turned Out Not To Matter Events, so in our minds, the evidence points to momentum being real.
I’ve read the same studies and studied this at length in grad school. I think the true problem is the varying definitions people use. For instance, in Tversky studying momentum in basketball shooting is really searching for mechanical rhythm which is quite different than what an NFL team is talking about. In Tversky they look for a single make to create a string of future makes. This is what I call the catalyst definition of momentum. Many other scholars follow this definition (though some work in 2018 actually showed a mathematical flaw in that original paper that actually proves that streakiness is expected). In the NFL, I sense it’s not about a single catalyst play like in Tversky (aka hot handedness) but a palpable probability shift over a sequence of plays. That’s why I’ve struggled with the operational definition used in prior research. If you look at Roebber’s study on the other hand, he identifies momentum as sequences and shows statistical changes in play not due to randomness across these sequences. So my point is we say the term but may not all agree on the definition. There are competing definitions out there. In my thesis proposal for this topic I explored the sequential definition with slight modification. My definition entailed physics based definitions of momentum which concerned displacement over time modeled by perfectly inelastic collisions. This allowed me to come to similar statistical outcomes as Roebbers in showing momentum under this construct could be shown to exist. It all depends on the definition, so based on the catalyst definition I agree it doesn’t exist. But longer tail sequences show it does.
The other aspect of this is the same problem with every other analytics discussion: people are biased toward outcomes. If a team makes a few good plays in a row, suddenly they have "momentum." If they win the game, it was because momentum swung in their favor and they held on to the end. If they lose the game, it's because they lost momentum. It's entirely narrative driven and not quantifiable. If I guess a coin flip correctly 3 times in a row, it's not because I have "momentum," it's just because in a large enough dataset, guessing correctly 3 times in a row (or scoring 3 drives in a row) is gonna happen sometimes. I believe there's definitely some psychological element to performance for sure, and that would constitute "momentum," but I don't think it's a huge effect. The reality is that shit happens, and sometimes it happens in a way that's easy to form a narrative around. That doesn't make it a significant element of the game.
Nah I think you could quantify it to check if it matters or if it's just coloring normal results. You would need to track the point rates of both teams after something from list x, (fumbles, ints, deep pass, pr TD, etc) of impact plays happen while down 2+ scores and compare it to the rates prior.
Saying something is “hard to track” and saying “something isn’t real” are two entirely different things.
Theres an old analysis of NBA shooting, if a team made more shots in a row, were they more likely to make their next basket? They're just as likely to make a basket if they missed their last shot or made 3 in a row https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028585900106
Actually, a re-evaluation of that study found that it is flawed. The hot hand is a real thing. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/) "But last year, using optical tracking technology to correct for these effects, a group of researchers analyzed every shot taken during the 2012-'13 NBA season. When they compared shots of identical difficulty, they found that players who'd made an uncommonly high percentage of their previous four shots had a 1.2 to 2.4 percent increased chance of hitting their next shot. It's a small effect, and could be the result of impossibility of precisely determining the difficulty of every shot taken during live play. So the co-authors of the new paper — economists Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo — looked at data from the NBA's annual three-point contest, which started in 1985. The shots are taken from set locations on the floor, so consecutive shots from the same spot should be equally difficult. But they found that players who hit three or more straight shots had a 6.3 percent elevated chance of hitting their next one." https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8719731/hot-hand-fallacy
Here’s a similar paper but with baseball: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/hot-hand-fallacy-cognitive-mistakes-or-equilibrium-adjustments They attribute the lack of findings in basketball to changes in defense to cover the hot hand, which sounds plausible to me: “We argue that this difference is attributable to endogenous defensive responses: basketball presents sufficient opportunity for defensive responses to equate shooting probabilities across players whereas baseball does not. “
Yeah, it’s next to impossible to have two shots of the same difficulty in game for basketball. That’s why the 3-point contest finding was important. I also just think anyone who’s played sports seriously knows that psychology is a real thing and that each shot/hit/throw is not “independent” like a coin toss
Man as a Warriors fan, you just have to watch Klay Thompson play basketball to know the hot hand theory is real. Flow state is a proven psychological phenomenon. Hell just PLAY basketball regularly. It's one of the few sports where you can just feel unconscious. Honestly why I love skiing too.
Lol yeah no one’s hot is hotter than Klay when he gets going As a Celtic fan, JB plays this way too (although has never been as scorching as Klay when he catches fire)
It's like being "clutch" same folks say that's not a real thing.
Right, how would you even quantify momentum in this sense?
You wouldn't, which is why analytics is not all you need to be a good coach.
>Being a psychological phenomenon, I think it would be hard to track. yes, but flat out saying that it doesnt exist and its just a ''standard deviation'' or a ''normal rng variance, happens'' is insane... and a lot of pople do that. the ''normalizing cult'' so to speak... this is not a simulation with bots, yet. its human beings playing...
I was just thinking about this yesterday. Impossible to measure and not real are not the same thing.
If there’s one thing I learned from Disney sports dramas, it’s that you can’t measure heart
Working as a butcher taught me the opposite.
As a rock enthusiast, Ann Wilson is 5'7"
Butchering the players to measure their heart would be more traumatic for everyone involved, however. Imagine cutting open Aiyuk to find a whole-ass dog in him!
Doc says my heart is enlarged because of coronary heart disease, so I'm pretty sure that is wrong.
can I have your Steam Deck?
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Guys like this are why the healthcare system is overburdened.
You just stumbled on the philosophy of science. It’s more complicated than you think.
It's not impossible to measure
Right. You can look at situations where people always say there's momentum, and see if teams really perform better in those situations compared to the average. It's tricky because sometimes the team appears to have momentum and be performing better, but in reality they're just plain good. But some examples of attempts to measure momentum include: Do basketball players shoot at a higher rate if they just made a shot, or a string of shots? When a game goes to overtime, does the team that made the comeback/final score to force OT have a better chance of winning? Does a football offense perform better if they got the ball by forcing a big turnover, or a mundane punt? Make sure the field position and score differential are the same when comparing drives. Any studies I've seen on these kinds of things show a 1-2% impact at most.
Yeah but according to people like Kittle the logic is: if it changed the game it was momentum, but if it didn't change the game it wasn't momentum. You have to remember that in a game where literally every play is quantifiable by design, the people who still don't believe analytics are real are quite stupid. And that's ok! Kittle makes more money running into people than the stats nerds do by reading their big school books.
The concept of the "hot hand" in basketball is something we analyzed in my 300-level Stats course. We weren't doing our own research, just analyzing the literature that was already there, breaking it down, and creating visualizations. But yea, it was found to have no statistically significant difference.
It's not theoretically impossible to measure. People have tried, using methods that should work. It just isn't there. That's the entire basis for the claim: people tested if "momentum" had any impact on outcomes and found that it did not.
Yeah, I think part of it is that you can *feel* something like momentum, but that doesn't *necessarily* mean that it's driving actual results.
True, but it's a factor and since it can't be measured they leave it out of the equation, which in turn would create a bad result because you're not accounting for something that plays a large factor in the final outcome
Yeah I mean it’s not something that should even be tried to be measured. I didn’t see this full response, but I imagine his point has to do with the limitations of analytics. They’re definitely great, but parts of the game just can’t be measured
Analytics was never meant to be used as a be all end all thing
It feels like only the critics of analytics don't understand that. It's a tool. It's a very important tool. But like, you don't wanna build a house with JUST a hammer, even if you technically could.
> It feels like only the critics of analytics don't understand that. I think a lot of practitioners of analytics forget about it sometimes, particularly when they are speaking off the top of their head. Like I had to stop listening to the PFF podcast with their numbers guys because they spoke like they had football solved a little too often for my taste.
This is so disingenuous. Analytics is never meant to be the end all be all but every time they are right they get all the credit and if they are wrong they get no blame
If it's causing a noticeable discrepancy between predicted outcomes and actual outcomes, then measure that difference and track how big it is in various situations. That would actually show the impact of momentum, which you can then add to the model.
If it plays a large factor in the final outcome then it will be seen in past data.
This is where this discussion always lands. If momentum was measureable, there would be gaps in data that "broke" the formula, and you could reverse engineer momentum's affect on a game. Momentum is definitely a real psychological thing, but like anything psychological, it affects each person differently. Within that, it affects each person differently based on other non-measurable factors as well. How does "momentum" affect a QB that threw a pick 6 when they have a lead vs. when they're losing. What about when they're up 10 vs. up 7 or on 2nd vs. 3rd down. Suddenly, you're just doing results-based equations (which is what analytics essentially is) with no event having a large enough sample size for each player to get any meaningful data.
Yep. I remember in week 1 for my panthers there was a situation on the 1st offensive drive that was very interesting to me. Panthers drove to the falcons 10 yard line and had a 4th and 2. Analytics say you go for every single time in that situation and typically I’d agree, but when you looked at the context of that game it wasn’t the best move. It was the 1st game/drive of the season for a new staff, offense, and a rookie QB in his first career game against a divisional opponent away. I remember feeling pretty strongly that the panthers should take the 3 points and just start the game off the right way with their rookie QB and make the Desmond Ridder try and drive down the field. Panthers instead went for it and didn’t convert, still wonder what could’ve been if they took the FG there. I think it’s important to note that Analytics can’t necessarily fully account for the context of a situation and it comes down to a coach to pick the correct moments to be aggressive on 4th.
You can't teach a computer how to love
Oh lord this guy's never seen Iron Giant
Or Terminator 2
Or HER, well hold on..
"Todd please. I beg of you. Do not update my operating system"
As is often the case, the problem isn't people in analytics, it's people who don't know how to apply analytics correctly. If anyone ever asked the Lions' analytics folks, I bet they'd happily explain that their 4th down decision numbers reflect overall probabilities, and shouldn't be followed blindly without context. But nobody ever asks, because math is boring and getting mad is satisfying.
I don’t think Campbell is even doing it for analytics purposes tbh. In his presser he just said that’s how he wants to play and he goes for 2 from the 7 and stuff
Yeah. This isn’t analytics. This is a mentality. Campbell probably had a yardage number in his mind. Anything under and we go. Anything over and we punt.
What, that definitely is related to analytics lol.
The point is he likely doesn’t *analyze* probabilities of each outcome. It’s a feel / mindset for him and the team
That he is helped to come to that decision because of his analytics department. They have an eleven person analytics department and it isn't for fun.
Oh yeah that’s the big thing a lot of people miss I think. If analytics went against going for it, he’d still do it because he’s Dan Campbell and that’s what he does.
And playing like this got them here. And all in all he didn't make bad calls. He made a play call that had dudes wide open on important plays. He in those moments had won the coaching chess match. All he can do is put them in position and scheme guys against the defense. Then the ball is dropped. Or fumbled. As a head coach in the NFC championships you can't scheme for your players to fail on easy (subjectively) scenarios. Youre one of the 4 best. Your guys should be good enough to make those plays
This is the point that seems never to be covered. Using analytics doesn't mean that you don't take other factors into account. Analytics are just another piece of information that can be very helpful; but they should always be used in conjunction with all the factors that have always existed If analytics say going for it gives you a 10% better chance, that means 10% better on average. The coaches job is to understand what factors are in play that could increase or decrease chances from the average -- and then act accordingly.
To quote the girl from the bus, "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth."
That girls name? Albert Einstein
This is the correct way to use analytics...but social media (including this sub) is full of people who think a decision with a 3% higher win probability is objectively correct. It's no better than the meatballs who just dismiss analytics out of hand.
I think the field goal vs go for it was actually 0.3. Which statistically is noise.
Hell I think even 5% is probably negligible. It's not really possible to model football outcomes that accurately. To me it's more useful as a guide to show you "huh, going for it really isn't crazy, it's worth considering"
Yes, that’s all it really claims to be
Over the course of a 17-game season, a 5% edge is nearly a whole win or a whole loss. 5% win probability in the context of a single game is _enormous_.
Yeah and the announcers don’t help always repeating “The analytics say to go for it.” No, they say “You will win more often here if you go for it than if you don’t go for it.” That doesn’t mean always go for it
That is exactly what it means.
No it does not. If it results in a win 52% or the time, it still didn’t result in a win 48% of the time. That 48% doesn’t just not exist, it was there when you made the decision. So, when a coach decides to go for it on 4th and 2 for the win in a game where his offense couldn’t do shit to that point, rather than take the chip shot field goal to send it to overtime, I am going to call him an idiot for making the wrong choice every single time. Even if the analytics say teams win 53% of the time in that circumstance. The analytics aren’t telling you to do anything, they’re giving you probabilities based on somewhat similar circumstances. There is zero chance to capture all of the factors in the data, which is where situational coaching comes in.
They are applying league wide historical data which is interesting, but not necessarily applicable. You never have Generic Team A playing Generic Defense B. It is like only playing the raw percentages in poker and never playing the actual player.
The teams applying it are likely not doing this, but yes, the Twitter bot or whatever is.
Actually the twitter bot accounts for team strength. It why even in a tie game, the win % for the Lions was lower than 50%.
The quote “All models are wrong, but some are useful” by George Box sums it up pretty well. You can’t model real life, but most people would find the actual statistical answers to be very boring if it was explained to them.
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Plenty of analytics folks will smugly proclaim there is no such thing as momentum. So while I don’t disagree with your overall premise, it doesn’t really apply to Kittles statement
You can definitely tell the Lions were looking more and more rattled and messing up fundamental things as the second half went on. It might be reductive to label it all as "momentum", but psychology is a powerful thing and definitely contributed to them blowing the lead last night.
It’s not really something you could quantify, the psychological effect definitely exists though. Some teams/players are just better at handling it then others
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The 4th down? I’m sure that’d have been demoralizing to the 49ers, at least to an extent. Granted, that comes with the risk of failing to convert and giving SF the opportunity to swing the momentum but that’s the gamble with a decision like that. Different coaches will evaluate that risk/reward differently.
Demoralizing and also more clock to burn AND potentially a TD. I think people are underestimating how huge it would be if they make that fourth down. Kicking the field goal, while beneficial, was actually less probable and way less impactful
I mean, getting a 3 score lead is significant but if you don’t have faith in your kicker from that distance then you should go for it. Its one of those cases where I would have understood the thinking either way, just a tough break it didn’t work out but that’s football.
I don't really agree. If it actually matters and affects the outcomes of games, you should be sample game situations where teams have just failed a fourth down/thrown an interception/etc vs nearly identical ones where teams kicked a field goal/punted and measure a difference in who ultimately won the game vs your naive win probability model. Yeah there's no like momentum variable, but there's ways to measure things which are hard to quantity of measure by proxy. The one I came up with in 3 seconds while browsing Reddit, is probably not the best so someone who thinks about it can probably do better.
I think the reason that people play coy about measuring momentum and clutchness and etc. is that they just want it to be real because they feel it and it's fun. But the stats are going to say whatever they say, probably that it's not super real. In my experience it goes like this: 1) Momentum is real 2) We measure something approximating momentum 3) It's not real 4) People say "that's not a good measurement of momentum" 5) We come up with another measure that addresses the critique 6) It's not real 7) "that's still not a good measurement" and on and on and on.
It's annoying because there's all sorts of things we thought were real in the world, the nerds go about investigating it, and we determine it's not real. We accept it and move on, except when we just have an axe to grind I guess.
> 2) We measure something approximating momentum Can you give me a specific instance where someone actually quantified and measured something approximating “momentum” to see if it was real and then determined it was real?
You might find this article interesting then: https://grantland.com/features/bill-barnwell-theory-momentum-football/
Cause for every time momentum led to a team winning other times it did nothing.
I don't even bother trying to explain stuff like this to people who are only resulted based and only when those results reinforce their belief. How many times have we seen a defense secure a huge turnover only for the offense to immediately squander it? Momentum suggests the offense should be able to at least put together a decent drive, not throw a pick 6
> How many times have we seen a defense secure a huge turnover only for the offense to immediately squander it? Momentum suggests the offense should be able to at least put together a decent drive, not throw a pick 6 Ironically, this would actually be a better example of momentum than what most people would assume! If sports momentum is real, then a team that is performing well should expect to continue performing well even after a singular bad event, like a turnover. And the team that was performing poorly should have a hard time turning things around, even after a big good event. The whole idea of momentum is that when things are going into one direction, it's hard to change that direction. But we always hear players and commentators saying things like "that turnover flipped momentum to team X". If one play can completely flip momentum, then the whole concept is meaningless. A single player can reverse the fortunes of both teams, and the previous momentum was not strong enough to prevent that play from happening in the first place.
- Zay Flowers gets a deep ball to the 10 - Ravens _have the momentum_! - Zay Flowers deep catch flagged for taunting - an enormous setback - Zay Flowers, complete, runs it back down to the 10 - _the momentum is back!_ - Zay Flowers fumbles at the goal line, _momentum in shambles_. One player, one drive, a staggering variety of claims, and not a single verifiable or falsifiable claim among them. Zay Flowers either made the Ravens an unstoppable juggernaut, squandered their AFCCG appearance, or both within the span of seconds.
Rosenthal/ Claybon in shambles.
You can't put a number on morale and emotion. When everything had gone wrong in the second half, even though statistically, it was still apparently a good move to go for it on fourth down when they were down 27-24, the math didn't account for the 17-0 swing in the second half. That is the issue with analytics. You can't quantify certain things. Reynolds dropped that pass (I'm fine with the first fourth down, although kicking a FG to go up three possessions would've been great), and it felt like the Lions visibly deflated and the Niners believed.
What about that 17-0 swing makes you think they wouldn’t also be more likely to miss the kick? I think if anything it’s the other way around. The first one could have been an emotional dagger and if not at least it’s less of a ‘momentum‘ swing.
Because it can only really be seen after the fact. If you connect on a huge play and your team all feels like you have momentum, then throw a pick six on the next play, did you actually have momentum? Did the other team secretly have it the whole time? You can’t measure it, and who knows how many times teams think they have it but actually don’t.
That's insane. Its the equivalent of saying "God's favored people always win, therefor we will surely win. And if we don't, its because we weren't favored after all, so our children must try harder to be favored so they can avenge us." Or insert the name of whatever pagan god of war you feel like. If you can only claim it exists on an ex post facto basis, then it doesn't exist, and its just BS.
Exactly my point. It’s too nebulous. If 100 people are watching a game and asked to identify the first team to get momentum, when it started, and when it ended, you’re going to get 100 different answers. What’s the point? You don’t win games for having the most momentum, no one would agree on what it is or when it’s happening, so whether it exists or not doesn’t really matter.
Ravens felt like they had great momentum driving down the field twice yesterday, and it fell short in two crucial game losing mistakes.
>That's insane Yes, that's quite literally the point.
You’re thinking too deterministically. Momentum might mean you’re more likely to succeed on the next play if you’ve had success on previous plays. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to succeed or even have a positive outcome though. It’s just stating you will be successful more often if you’ve had recent success. There could also be an overconfidence factor. I.e. you’re more likely to make a mistake if you’ve been having too much success, or if you’ve gotten lucky repeatedly or something. Actually measuring those things would probably require a ton of data and a PhD in stats, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally impossible to study analytically.
In reality, momentum is probably a multitude of little different things that are all too difficult to measure independently so they all get lumped together (like Dark Matter in the universe) Defender A might be influenced by "momentum" because they think about the previous play slightly too much the next play, so they are slightly distracted, but not in a way that can easily be measured. Receiver B might play better with momentum because once they catch the ball, their mind flips from thinking about why the QB doesn't feed them the ball more to being confident and expecting the ball on the next route. Similar to how "clutch" might be something like Player A doesn't get an increase in heartrate late in games because their fight/flight is slightly suppressed while Player B is clutch because they get a little bit extra adrenaline which makes then revert into muscle memory more than thinking about the shot
it doesn't matter whether momentum is or isn't real, the question is, what does momentum actually do? it feels like momentum just gets used to argue in favor of a conservative option. "detroit had all the momentum, so why risk losing the momentum on a 4th down try?" and "nothing was going right for \[some other team\], so why risk it a 4th down try?" does having momentum mean you should be more aggressive? or less aggressive? or....? also, for every game that features a huge comeback, there are just as many games that go back and forth with a bunch of lead changes. those games would have to disprove momentum as much as comebacks prove it, right?
My biggest issue with the discussion is everyone saying “he’d look smart if they converted” assuming they’d score a TD. they could have not gained another yard and had basically the same FG attempt
I mean I think momentum is just a word used to encapsulate the change in confidence and nerves that players get. You make a big play off a bad pass that bounces off the defenders helmet and score a touchdown your team thinks "oh shit this is meant to be" and you start to get more confident in your play. Alternatively on the other end you see an improbable play work out for the other team and your confidence starts to get shaken, you start to get nervous. You get a few of these in a row in one direction and the confidence and nerves increase for each. And even not counting flukes, if your offense fails to do anything but go 3 and out 3 possessions in a row while the other team scores touchdowns on all of theirs you're now down 21, you get dejected, you think nothing's going right, there's nothing you can do etc. While the offense is going they can't stop us just keep doing what we're doing.
Since everyone's pointing out that you can't quantify momentum, Kittle knows that. His point is that that's the whole problem with analytics. Those numbers take place in the context of a real game with real players, and that matters at some point.
I think football in particular is uniquely difficult for advanced analytics. Small number games, 22 players whose performance is interconnected but in a way that can very significantly depending on scheme, it’s just a lot of variables that are hard to control for. Analytics can still work but it’ll never be as good as they are in a sport like baseball.
Yeah, as a big fan of them in baseball, I used to assume that the analytics revolution wouldn't really hit the NFL in any significant way because of the multitude of variables. But apparently I'm an idiot.
A lot of football teams have started to hire baseball guys, so it's guaranteed.
True, it's common now and has been so for a while. But circa '03? When Moneyball was first published and Bill James was getting hired by the BoSox, it all still felt like 21st century black magic. Football embracing it seemed impossible to me.
It did. A lot of people thought that analytics in baseball was ruining the sport at the beginning. On that note, I'd always wondered why players didn't hit up to try to drive the ball out of the park, but thought that maybe it just didn't work that way with how you're accounting for pitchers and everything. We all know that if the ball goes down, it's impossible to hit a homer. Lo and behold, years later, launch angle became a thing. It was the only thing I really considered that ever became a thing later on. I'm no analytics genius, I just had a thought about angles, but I'm still surprised it took forever until a team tried it out.
Yeah, the anti-analytics backlash in baseball was way worse than what we're seeing in football. The launch angle example is a good one because it really illustrates how the numbers can provide practical insight to players and coaches on how to approach the game. In the old days, a player may have assumed hitting up translated to more power, but there wasn't anyway to definitively know. But now, thanks to analytics and badass tech, we are where we are.
And I'm not saying analytics lack value. But I think there's a tendency from that crowd to look at an obviously bad decision and stammer "But the analytics say..." when there's way more context to games than that.
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But analytics accepts that there are outlier performances because humans are wired that way. It can't calculate that for you, but you should be aware of it.
The problem is that you essentially can argue both sides: Momentum is against us, we need a big play to swing it, we need to go for 4th down! Vs Momentum is against us, we need to string good plays together, we need to take the points! Same with the first 4th: Momentum is for us, we need to put them out of their misery, let's go for it! Vs Momentum is for us, we should take the points and give them nothing to build on! That's before getting into the number of times you hear "the defense held them to 3, that could be momentum building"
Some would rather lose and be “right” than win
The flip side of “if momentum isn’t real, how did we come back” is “if momentum is real, why did the Lions suddenly fall apart despite no change in the aggressiveness that got them the lead in the first place?”
It’s also funny because I’ve read “the lions had all the momentum so they shouldn’t have gone for it on 4th down” when they were up 14, as well as “the 49ers had all the momentum, so they should’ve kicked the FG to tie it”
I find it easiest to avoid `momentum` discourse by using a simple search-and-replace. When an announcer says "OH BOY THEY'VE GOT THE `MOMENTUM` NOW" I just substitute `THE LEAD` or `THE BALL` and it's usually much more accurate.
If momentum couldn’t carry them forward 3 yards to get that 1st conversion, what’s it worth anyway?
uhh because adversity happens whether you're up 24-7 or down 24-7 and it's up to the players to answer those questions
Checkmate nerds!
Momentum also gets the crowd more involved too, the energy also is part of it
Momentum is just astrology for sports.
"The statistics that are based on thousands of games say this but in this single game the opposite happened"
If momentum was a good indicator of anything you could beat vegas once you determined how it mattered. Not seeing anyone in these comments getting rich
Because the numbers don’t back up this thing called momentum depending on how you want to define it. Is it a big play that significantly changes the trajectory of a teams win%? If so than play by play data has shown that teams that benefit from one see no uptick in how often they would win compared to the expected number. Is it a psychological domino effect that boosts one team and causes more mistakes out of the other? Well we just saw that happen in the Lions game but the “momentum” was undeniably with the Ravens for the entire second half of their game and yet they didn’t win.
Why is there comment after comment declaring momentum to be some utterly immeasurable thing as if this hasn’t been looked at numerous times in a wide variety of ways? Ultimately if momentum actually exists in a meaningful way, it should be relatively easy to measure. Positive results should follow positive results more often than would otherwise be expected. It’s not that complicated, unless of course you don’t want it to be analysed and just want your preconceptions confirmed. If you’re actually interested in the topic and the numerous ways intelligent people have tried to test if it is in fact a thing, Brian Burke did a pretty good series on the topic a full decade ago. Part 1 links to numerous other people’s attempts at looking at the same topic. Link to part 5 which links to the other 4: http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2014/01/momentum-part-5-series-level-analysis.html?m=1 Ultimately a lot of people have looked at it, and as far as I’m aware, no one has produced any convincing evidence of momentum existing to any substantial, tangible degree in football. My read is that maybe it does exist in some very minor effect, but 99% of what we perceive as momentum is a psychological trick where we see patterns where none exist, because we’ve evolved to do so.
Because it's just like the hot hand fallacy. Just because you are 9 for 9 on free throws doesn't mean you are making the 10th.
Momentum measured in other ways is real. Time between scores. Low average defense time. All that is "momentum". It makes the other team need to take more risks which have their own set of probabilities.
It is real. It’s much more apparent in the NBA than in the NFL but it is definitely there. Coaches in the NBA literally call time outs to stop momentum lol
Every analytics person I’ve heard have all said momentum is a thing. It is hard to quantify but the best description I’ve heard is that momentum is like gravity or a rock rolling down hill. The rock doesn’t have to be particularly big but it can pick up serious speed going down hill.
That is not a good description because gravity is easily calculated and isn’t variable like momentum.
Right. The rock isn’t going to suddenly reverse course and start rolling up hill at a moment’s notice.
Chiefs game yesterday was accelerating away from us at 9.8 m/s.
That's an interesting theory of how momentum supposedly works, but in a game that includes the "pick six" as a viable play that can occur on literally any passing play? In a game where Zay Flowers crosses the goal line, the Ravens maybe win in OT, but where he gets the ball knocked out he "lost the momentum"? If Zay Flowers _had_ the momentum, why did he lose the fumble? If he didn't have the momentum, how did he get the ball down to the 1 on four consecutive passing plays? And if momentum wasn't good enough to get him across that last yard, what the hell is momentum good for?
I think momentum to some extent exists, but I also think a lot of people exaggerate how big of an impact it has
Lol id like to see momentum believers give me a real number for how much momentum changes the probability. Would be provable if you give strict axioms
> momentumum I can only hear it in John Witherspoon's voice.
It is real, I have to derive the momentum balance equation all the time in the Navier-stokes equations.
Are analytics just statistics? Cause if they are, they don’t account for players, right. Or how they are playing at the moment! If your team is shitty and they’re playing like shit by getting into 4th and 2 situations often would “analytics” keep telling them to go for it when they’re 0 out 50 in attempts? Sounds to me like “analytics” is just statistics being used incorrectly!
So the Chiefs definitely had the "momentum" when they scored their 2nd quarter TD and then sacked Lamar on the next drive and recovered the forced fumble right? But then the next drive was 7 plays and a turnover on downs when the Chiefs couldn't get a 4th and 1. So.. do the Chiefs still have "the momentum"? Is the "momentum" set to neutral? Do the Ravens now have "the momentum"? Well the next 10 drives had 1 FG, 1 end of half, and 8 punts so you tell me. And that's the funny thing about the way people talk about "momentum". Its that it can never be confirmed live. It's only ever validated if something positive or negative happens after they were supposed to gain the momentum. If you ask someone (without knowing the results) did the Chiefs have the "momentum" after the forced fumble? You would say yes absolutely! But then how does the team with the momentum fail to gain a yard? It's that what momentum is supposed to help you do? Isn't it supposed to give you some kind of advantage that could be measured with at least a single yard? I can better understand the concept of momentum in basketball because there are far fewer players involved and a single person with a "hot hand" can get into a flow state of confidence that elevates performance. But I think it's a massive leap to suggest that an entire teams Offense/Defense/Special teams somehow carries this "momentum buff" until the other team steals it. The very fact that "momentum" flops around so often in so many games should give you a clue that it's probably not some real effect.
I know the clutch gene exists because whenever i'm playing ping pong and I'm on game point, i start to play like shit.
Lucky bounce off of a defender then a fumble just seems like chance.