The Decision Lab Podcast

Cold Open

Maizy: Third quarter. Down ten to three. Fourth and one at the Bengals' forty. Last week my kicker made a fifty-eight-yarder from almost the same spot. I'm sending him out, Oak.

Oakley: What if I told you that even if he's guaranteed to make it, you'd still be worse off than going for the yard?

Maizy: Guaranteed? I'd tell you you've been staring at that computer too long.

Oakley: Then that's what we're talking about today.

Welcome to The Decision Lab

Oakley: Welcome to The Decision Lab. I'm Oakley.

Maizy: And I'm Maizy.

Oakley: This is where we look at the decisions that shape sports. Not just what happened, but what people knew, what their options were, and whether the choice made sense at the time.

Maizy: And where I remind Oak that games are played by people. Not spreadsheets.

Oakley: She's very good at that.

Maizy: Somebody has to keep you grounded, Oaks.

Oakley: One thing up front. Maize and I are AI-generated hosts. The research we talk about is real, and all of it is at Pascal Initiative dot com.

Maizy: So today it's two field goals.

Oakley: Same kicker. Same distance. Very different value.

Two Kicks, One Week Apart

Oakley: The kicker is Houston's Ka'imi Fairbairn.

Maizy: Hold on. Did you just say that right?

Oakley: Ka'imi. I practiced.

Maizy: Look at you.

Oakley: And that's the short version.

Maizy: How long is the long version?

Oakley: He says it's fifty-six letters, counting everything. Most of it is one middle name.

Maizy: Fifty-six? Oaks, that's not a name. That's an offensive playbook.

Oakley: The name he goes by, Ka'imi, is Hawaiian. It's been reported to mean "seeker of wisdom."

Maizy: Good. We could use some today.

Oakley: So. Week one, against Buffalo. Houston's down thirty to twenty-eight, just under seven minutes left in the game, fourth and four at the Bills' thirty-nine. Fairbairn makes it from fifty-eight. Houston takes the lead.

Maizy: Big kick.

Oakley: One week later, Cincinnati. Third quarter, seven thirty-three on the clock, Houston trailing ten to three. Fourth and one at the Bengals' forty. Same kick, fifty-eight yards. DeMeco Ryans sends Fairbairn out again, and afterward he pointed to the Buffalo kick as part of the reason.

Maizy: Makes sense to me. The guy just made one.

Oakley: This one came up short.

Maizy: Fifty-eight yards is a long kick, Oak. Good kickers miss those.

Oakley: They do. Our model put a kick that long, indoors, at about two chances in three. But here's what I find interesting. We estimated how much each kick mattered: the gap in Houston's chance of winning between a make and a miss. Against Buffalo, about twenty-five percentage points. Against Cincinnati, about ten.

Maizy: Well, sure. In Buffalo the kick puts you ahead late in the fourth. In Cincinnati you make it and you're still down four with a quarter and a half to play. You still need a touchdown.

Oakley: That's exactly it. You didn't need the model to tell you which way it goes.

Maizy: I rarely do.

Oakley: The model helps with how much. And with the real question: not whether he could make it, but whether Houston should have kicked at all.

The View from the Sideline

Maizy: Okay. Stand on my sideline for a second. Earlier in this same game, tied at zero, Houston goes for it on fourth and one at the Bengals' eighteen. Stopped. Loses a yard. Then right before this decision, they fail on third and one.

Oakley: That all happened.

Maizy: So I've watched my line get pushed back twice on short yardage today. At some point, what you're seeing has to count.

Oakley: It should count. The question is how much. The same offense converted two fourth-and-one runs the week before. Two stops one way, two conversions the other. That's not a lot to go on.

Maizy: It's not nothing.

Oakley: No. And the model can't see what you see. Who's hurt. Who's gassed. What's on the call sheet.

Maizy: Here's one from the officiating side, too. "Fourth and one" on a stat sheet can be inches or a full yard. That's a spot somebody made at the bottom of a pile.

Oakley: That's a fair hit. The model only knows "one yard." It doesn't know the earlier one was called fourth and inches.

Maizy: And it doesn't know whether I'm calling a sneak.

Oakley: That one we did look at. The highest conversion estimates we found, around eighty percent, came from quarterback sneaks. Our main estimate doesn't assume a play call. It came out around seventy-one percent.

Maizy: So the play call is part of the decision.

Oakley: It is. Point to you.

The Decision Threshold

Oakley: So here's how we compare the choices. Not "which play is more likely to work," but "what is each choice worth, counting what happens if it fails?" Houston had three options: punt, kick, or go. In our model, punting and kicking came out almost exactly even. Houston wins about twenty-nine percent of the time either way.

Maizy: Nobody ever talks about the punt.

Oakley: It was a real option. Going for it, at that seventy-one percent conversion estimate, came out near thirty-seven.

Maizy: So going for it is seven or eight points better.

Oakley: About that. And remember the cold open? Even if we pretend Fairbairn is guaranteed to make the kick, Houston's at about thirty-two and a half. Still below going for it.

Maizy: Because you're still down four.

Oakley: Right. A conversion keeps the ball and keeps the touchdown in play. So flip the question around. How often would Houston need to convert for going for it to break even with kicking?

Maizy: Sixty? Fifty?

Oakley: About twenty-eight percent.

Maizy: Twenty-eight. So they could fail almost three times out of four, and it's still a wash?

Oakley: Under this model, yes. That's the decision threshold. Above it, going for it gives Houston the better estimated chance to win. Below it, you kick or punt.

Maizy: So instead of asking, "Do I think we get the yard?" I'm asking, "How sure do I need to be?"

Oakley: That's the whole idea.

But What If the Model Is Wrong?

Maizy: All right. You say seventy-one. I've seen my line stuffed twice. Maybe I think it's forty.

Oakley: Then I owe you some honesty about that twenty-eight. It isn't carved in stone. We refit the model two hundred times on different samples of past games, and the threshold moved. In almost all of them, it landed somewhere between about eighteen and forty-eight percent.

Maizy: That's a wide range for a number you just made me pause for.

Oakley: It is. At seventy-one percent, going for it won in every single refit. But at forty, you're inside that range. Some versions say go, some say kick. It's close.

Maizy: And if I think it's twenty?

Oakley: Then you should probably kick.

Maizy: So my read on the offense matters.

Oakley: It does. The question is whether two short-yardage stops are strong enough to drag seventy-one all the way down to the line. I don't think they are.

Maizy: I'm not against numbers, Oak. I'm against numbers pretending they know things they don't.

Oakley: And I'm against gut feel pretending it can't be wrong.

Maizy: Careful now.

Oakley: Just keeping us both honest.

The Decision and the Outcome

Maizy: Here's what fans will say, though. Houston kicked, he missed, they lost. So kicking was wrong.

Oakley: And that's the trap. The miss isn't why the numbers favored going for it. If Fairbairn had made it, the numbers would say the same thing.

Maizy: And if they'd gone for it and got stopped again?

Oakley: People would have called it reckless. And the decision would still have been supported by what Houston knew before the snap.

Maizy: I've seen that one. Coach makes a gutsy call, it works, he's a genius. Same call next week, it fails, and they want him fired.

Oakley: Judge the decision by what was known. Judge the result by what happened. They're different questions.

Closing

Maizy: You know I'm still not sure I'd have gone for it.

Oakley: That's fine.

Maizy: But I'll admit I was valuing that kick like it was the Buffalo kick. It wasn't.

Oakley: And I'll admit you found two things my model can't see. The spot, and the play call.

Maizy: Write that down.

Oakley: Two fifty-eight-yard kicks. Same kicker. The distance tells you how hard the kick is. It doesn't tell you what it's worth.

Maizy: So what's next time?

Oakley: Baseball. When should a manager pull his starter?

Maizy: Oh, I have opinions on that.

Oakley: You have opinions on everything.

Maizy: And I'm usually right.

Oakley: I'm Oakley.

Maizy: And I'm Maizy.

Oakley: This has been The Decision Lab, a Pascal Institute production. The full research behind today's episode is at Pascal Initiative dot com. Improve the decision.