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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s the social expectations that are at play here. Instead, it’s that without video game football, the odds of a player ever being in this situation are minuscule — so minuscule that we’re currently commenting on an article written about one time that it happened twelve years ago — and so the correct strategy won’t be something that pops into your head when sprinting for the end zone. But if you play hundreds to thousands of iterated games of video game football where you control the ball on every play, you’re bound to run into the scenario and be detached enough to know what to do. Then that gets burned into your memory for the unlikely event it happens in real life.

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> But if you play hundreds to thousands of iterated games of video game football where you control the ball on every play, you’re bound to run into the scenario and be detached enough to know what to do.

Back in the day, the AI for opponents was often fairly stupid. Rather than spreading out intelligently to prevent an opponent from reaching the goal line, they would just sprint towards your current location at all times. So if you run in a bit of a loop from where it makes sense for you to actually go, you can get the opponents to chase you in a long line. Not hard to dodge them almost indefinitely in this case, allowing you to take an arbitrary amount of time off the clock. Real players won't behave like this.

> I don’t think it’s the social expectations that are at play here.

I agree, mostly, but there could be a slight effect here. It's widely known that coaches choose to punt rather than go for it on fourth down (in American football, failing to take the ball past a "first down" marker in five downs results in a turnover) much more often than they should if motivated purely to win the most games. It's speculated that coaches are disincentivized to make high-risk, high-reward choices like going for it, when trying and failing it will result in embarrassment versus taking the safe option.

The team gets only four downs, not five, to pass the first down line and reset it.

Picket fencing!

> in American football, failing to take the ball past a "first down" marker in five downs results in a turnover

Thanks for clarifying.

American football players are often stereotyped as big and dumb but... football is complicated. Often needlessly so. It takes extensive knowledge of the rules of the game in order just to figure out what's going on.

My favorite example:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3EpLn77JdQ

In this case, the rules say that if a kickoff is handled first by a player who has established themselves as out of bounds, a penalty is assessed and the ball moved to the 40 yard line. The intent is for a horribly miskicked ball to be penalized.

What you see is a special teams player knowing the rule, carefully and clearly establishing himself as out of bounds, and turning an excellently kicked ball at the one yard line into a ball 39 yards down field.

I’ve seen the commentators confused by this play before!

As a bit of an aside, the past few years have seen a drastic rise in coaches "going for it" on 4th down instead of punting in a lot of situations. This is mainly attributed to the rising use of analytics by coaching staffs.

It can be directly attributed to people studying the stats - but it had been known for years that "going for it on 4th" was statistically better. But coaches were loathe to do it because if they did, and failed, they'd get yelled at for not doing it "normally", and if they succeeded nobody would notice.

It took quite awhile for that logjam to break.

reminds me of the claim that the all the young mckinsey consultants fresh out of ivy league schools with no experience that are brought in are used as a way to justify layoffs and other decisions management already want to make, and then they can claim to rely on impartial outside judgement

but in this case the coaches can point at the analytics egg heads now

Reminds me of the oil drop experiment story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

> Back in the day, the AI for opponents was often fairly stupid. Rather than spreading out intelligently to prevent an opponent from reaching the goal line, they would just sprint towards your current location at all times. So if you run in a bit of a loop from where it makes sense for you to actually go, you can get the opponents to chase you in a long line. Not hard to dodge them almost indefinitely in this case, allowing you to take an arbitrary amount of time off the clock. Real players won't behave like this.

Imagine seeing someone pull off THAT tactic in a real game!

The penalty for making a mistake is extremely high, too. There are many examples of players easing up as they near the goal line because they think they're in the clear, and then getting hit or stripped at the last second, incurring eternal embarrassment or shame. You not only need to be in a very specific game situation, you also need to be extremely certain that none of the eleven opposing players are going to get a shot at you.

You can see him looking over his shoulder repeatedly, almost panicked, during his run because he's so worried about this actually happening. He had to make himself really sure this wouldn't happen.

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