It doesn’t seem a Sunday night motorcycle crash has altered the M.O. of Arkansas head coach Bobby Petrino. Although confined to his hospital room on Monday night, he still reviewed paperwork from a recent spring practice. By the next morning, he was watching practice live, four broken ribs, cracked vertebra, sprained neck and pain meds be damned. A few hours after that, he fielded questions from the press and even cracked a joke about the extent of his injuries: “Yeah, I don’t think I have any brain damage, but that’s yet to be seen. If I start not punting at all in the games or something, then we’ve got a problem.”
Petrino may have been joking, but I’m pretty sure one person not laughing was the coach of a private high school school only two and half hours from Fayetteville who has built a national reputation by refusing to punt among other unorthodox strategies. Kevin Kelley believes punting on fourth down is nearly always a bad idea, even when pinned deep in one’s own territory with 20 yards to go. Economists say the numbers back Kelley, who has won multiple state championships with Little Rock’s Pulaski Academy while putting up absurdly proficient offensive statistics.
While Kelley’s football philosophy has been much trumpeted by media – Time voted it the 33rd-best invention of 2009 – actual football coaches haven’t followed suit. Although some college coaches have made pilgrimages to Kelley’s office to learn his secrets, none seem to have incorporated his strategies into their own playbooks. Former Texas Tech Mike Leach might have been the college coach most publicly open to Kelley’s ideas, according to this Associated Press interview, but he was fired before he could implement them. Leach now coaches at Washington State University and may become the first major college coach to deliberately use Kelley’s methods.
Why do you think college coaches haven’t already tried Pulaski Academy’s system? Despite a wealth of data confirming its superiority, are coaches on the whole still creatures of habit who put more stock in intuition than freakonomics? On the whole, I think adopting such a new-fangled approach just seems too risky for multimillionaire coaches with more to lose than a high school P.E. teacher coaching on the side. Risk aversion as a rationale doesn’t stick in Petrino’s case, though. He had plenty more to lose Sunday evening when he got on his motorcycle without a helmet [but with a 25-year-old hottie].
