The Seahawks should have run the ball . . . right? What do the numbers say?

As a typical fan I am coping with my team’s last second loss through math and statistics. (Wait, that’s not part of the normal grieving cycle?)

There has been much written about how bad the Seahawks decision was to pass on 2nd and goal from the 1 yard line with less than 30 seconds on the clock, down by 4 in the Super Bowl. They have the best back on the field (if not in football) and they have always been a run first team. Clearly this was the wrong call . . . Right?

Let’s take a step back. Here are some basic points which are sometimes over looked:

• With the time left on the clock, and only one timeout, the Seahawks would likely have to throw the ball once to have time to use all 4 downs
• Defending a play is much more effective if you know (or strongly guess) what is coming (pass or run).
• Throwing the ball on second down was the only way to also play 4th down if needed, and keep the defense playing both run & pass for the remaining plays.

Based on my own experience I estimated the following likelihood of scoring a touchdown on one play. These are arbitrary because to my knowledge there is no official stat for “Defense expecting run” or “Defense expecting pass”. There is certainly room to challenge the numbers, but I will say I ran the analysis below with my first estimate, and made no changes to manipulate the result.

	Defense expectation
	Run	Either	Pass
Offense Runs	40%	50%	60%
Offense Passes	25%	15%	10%

With these numbers I calculated the following results. (Note in this analysis the percentages are inverse – A larger percentage is a larger chance the defense stops the play. This makes calculations easier).

	Probabilities of not scoring a touch down			Total % of Defense stop	Chances of Seahawks win
Seahawks sequence	2nd down	3rd down	4th down
Run, Run,  out of time	50%	50%	100%	25.00%	75.0%
Pass, Run, Run	85%	50%	50%	21.25%	78.8%
Run, Pass, run	50%	85%	60%	25.50%	74.5%
Run, pass, Pass	50%	85%	75%	31.88%	68.1%
pass, pass, pass	85%	85%	75%	54.19%	45.8%

So, counter-intuitively the Seahawks best chance of winning is by calling a less effective play on second down. You can tweak the numbers to get a different result, but at least the call was not such a monumentally bad decision as it is being portrayed.