Really enjoyed this:

So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to affect the sport over the last few decades: the ascent of the passing game. Since 1960, quarterbacks have managed to increase their average gain per pass attempt by nearly 30 percent, from 4.6 yards to 6.5 yards. (Running backs only get about 4 yards per attempt, a number that hasn't changed in thirty years.) Furthermore, even as quarterbacks have gotten more yards per pass, they have managed to throw fewer interceptions. In 1980, passes were picked off more than 6 percent of the time. By 1995, the rate of interceptions had been halved, which meant that passing the ball wasn't any statistically riskier than rushing.

Given these statistics, it shouldn't be surprising that NFL teams are passing more than ever before. Nevertheless, they still aren't passing enough. That, at least, is the conclusion of Ben Alamar, a professor of sports management at Menlo College. He argues that the NFL exhibits a "Passing Premium Puzzle". (This is the sports version of the Equity Premium Puzzle, which is the mystery of why investors hold so many low yield bonds when stocks perform so much better over the long-term.) Alamar notes that, despite the significant increase in the expected utility of the passing game, coaches still run the ball about 46 percent of the time. While this represents a decrease from the 1960's - the average NFL team use to run the ball more than 58 percent of the time - a perfectly rational coach would almost always choose to pass, since passing represents a higher rate of return. So why do coaches still run the ball? Alamar admits that a successful running game contributes to the success of the passing game, since you want the defensive backs to have to worry about the possibility of a run. But he isn't convinced that coaches need to run the ball quite so often. "For all of their planning and late nights," Alamar writes, "NFL coaches do not act in a fully rational manner." Just like investors choosing bonds over stocks - stocks have a much higher rate of return over the long run - coaches are swayed by the illusory perception of risk, or what's often known as risk aversion. Although passing the ball isn't statistically riskier than running the ball, it feels riskier, as the ball is lofted into the air and is up for grabs. The end result is that teams gain fewer yards than they might otherwise, simply because the brain isn't good at accurately calculating risks versus rewards.

 

A few things to take from this:

A) Mike Leach is a renaissance man, but more importantly:

B) Everyone wants this Notre Dame team to be some sort of power-running, old school Big Ten powerhouse.  If the personnel are there and that works, fantastic, but don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole (or you'd lose at Hole In The Wall!).  The best performances from Charlie Weis' offense would happen when Brady Quinn would get into a rhythm in the passing game, then working the running game in with screens and draws.  I'm not advocating for one way or the other, but don't desire to be a running team just because you think there's more honor in that.  If Clausen plays like he did in the fourth quarter and guys like Floyd and Tate pan out, there's no shame in just chucking it deep if that's the best option.

UPDATE: My friend Mike sent me this note from his dad, who's considerably better at math than either of us.  I don't have any idea what this means, but I thought I would pass it along.

"Pretty flimsy reasoning, I think. For one thing, you need to know not just the average but also the standard deviation before choosing an optimal mix. And you also need to know whether the yards per attempt measure holds up irrespective of the proportion of attempts. I suspect that yards per attempt would go down if the same type of play was run every time. There's also the issue of personnel - Navy could not play the way SDSU does, and vice versa."