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Sunday, January 16, 2011

Icing the kicker 

Asking the important questions: Does "icing the kicker" actually work? Or does it only appear to work?

Discuss amongst yourselves.


4 Comments:

By Blogger Assistant Village Idiot, at Sun Jan 16, 09:21:00 PM:

Willisms questions about selection bias likely do influence the 80-66 difference considerably. The question would be whether it explains the entire variance.  

By Blogger Gary Rosen, at Mon Jan 17, 02:01:00 AM:

That was good, that they considered the issue of selection bias. So often you get stats like these "raw" without considering that kind of stuff.

I have heard that some kickers actually like it if the timeout is called just in time but late enough that it doesn't stop the snap and kick - that way they get a free "practice" kick.  

By Blogger Gary Rosen, at Mon Jan 17, 02:08:00 AM:

Oops, didn't actually "discuss". My guess is that if you take selection bias out you would be down to something almost statistically insignificant, 3-4%. But if it's a game-deciding kick with no time left and the coach has a timeout to burn, he might as well use it even for a trivial advantage. I bet that drives a lot of these decisions - the coach saw it work once so why not give it a shot?  

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Mon Jan 17, 02:17:00 PM:

That's an awfully small sample size. My first reaction is that a much larger sample would likely tell you that more factors are at work than simply the time out issue.  

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