For those of us who grew up during the video game boom of the 1990s, the NBA Jam series was one of the pinnacles of console sports games. Gameplay featured a cartoony, two-on-two version of basketball where turbo-dunks saw players leap stories above the court and a third-consecutive basket literally torched the net. But for all of the embellishment the NBA Jam games adorned to sports, it seems as though the real-life NFL has taken a page from video game fiction in recent years.
NBA Jam included a setting called "computer assistance" that undoubtedly caused more Super Nintendo-destroying fights than any other game. When turned on, the setting would alter performances within the game so that the losing team could catch up and keep the game close. Ten-point leads in the fourth quarter would crumble under barrages of improbable three-pointers from the opposition. In the Sunday afternoon aftermath of three remarkable NFL comebacks, fans of the Bills, Eagles, and Cowboys must have felt like computer assistance is painfully real in the NFL.
Thanks to the number-crunching of AdvancedNFLStats.com, we can estimate fairly well just how improbable each of these comebacks was. Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Dallas all held at least 90% win probabilities at some point in the second half of their games on Sunday. In fact, if you froze all three games at the eventual loser's highest win probability point, there would be a .0081% change of all three teams coming back as they did. To put it another way, if you started all three games at the beginning of each comeback (the loser's win probability high point) and then played each game 10,000 times, you still wouldn't expect all three teams to come back even once.
Adding to the improbability of these three comebacks is not just that they happened within a small window on the same day, but instead which teams pulled them off. While the Lions, and to a lesser extent the 49ers and Bengals, have blossoming offenses, this was not Tom Brady or Peyton Manning simply adding more achievements to Hall of Fame resumes.
The 1991 Bills are often credited with the most famous NFL comeback, erasing a 35-3 Raider lead in the playoffs. But that team was somewhat revolutionary for its K-Gun offense triggered by Hall of Famer Jim Kelly. "Hall of Fame" and "revolutionary" are hardly terms that would feature prominently in a Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, or Andy Dalton word cloud.
Clearly, NFL offenses are becoming increasingly potent and passing-oriented. In 2010, the entire league averaged 539 pass attempts for the season, completing 60.8% (stats courtesy ProFootballReference.com). To put that in context, the 2000 NFL averaged 526 attempts per team at a 58.2% completion rate, while 1990 NFL teams only threw the ball 482 times per season and completed 56.0% of those.
This is where the job of an NFL coach is especially thankless. Conventionally, teams with substantial leads in the second half would emphasize their running games to avoid turnovers and keep the game clock running between plays. But given how comfortable teams have become in moving the ball with their passing games, time has become decreasingly valuable at the end of games. Running into the line three times might wipe two and a half minutes off the clock, but how important is that if rookie quarterbacks only need 45 seconds to cover most of the field?
Instead, there is only one alternative for an NFL play-caller to protect a lead: score even more.
Sure, when Tony Romo finds a way to throw 2 touchdowns to the opposing team to quickly erode a lead, the strategy seems flawed. But Dallas demonstrated precisely why you can never have too many points. On the third quarter drive that led to Romo's second pick-six, the Cowboys ran the ball on five of the six plays before the interception. The possession took less than five minutes off of the clock. Trailing 30-17, Detroit needed only two minutes to cover 80 yards in five plays.
If you overlook the pick, Dallas' part of that exchange was exactly what they wanted. The Cowboys picked up two first downs on the ground and ran some clock before giving up the ball. And even with that handled ideally, the Lions only spent less than seven minutes taking 7 points off the lead. If the Lions had used timeouts or stopped Dallas earlier in the drive, the toll on the clock would have been much shorter.
College offenses have become increasingly sophisticated. Rule changes favor the passing game. Even field conditions make moving the ball through the air more effective. Whatever, the reason, NFL passing games are more efficient and potent than they have ever been. And because of this, old ideas about late game strategy have to be reexamined.
The comebacks from this weekend should remind us that playing the clock prematurely is a dangerous thing. In a league where offenses always seem to be on fire, it no longer takes computer assistance to win from way back.
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