Washington Football Team head coach Ron Rivera believes in trusting his gut.
In an interview on the Rich Eisen Show, Rivera explained how he came to be “Riverboat Ron” after John Madden encouraged him to forget about doing this ‘by the book.’
“He said, ‘Ron, forget this book. Go by your gut instinct. You’ve played enough football, you’ve coached enough football to go by your gut. Go by how the game feels, do those things,’” Rivera said quoting Madden.
But Madden’s message to eschew ‘the book’ didn’t land until the following season. Rivera told Eisen it all started when he decided to go “by the book" and kick a field goal when up by three on the Bills late in the 4th quarter in Week 2 of the 2013 season.
After watching Buffalo went the length of the field in under two minutes to win the game by one with a TD and extra point, Rivera felt sick to his stomach.
"I'm was sick. I was ready to throw up, everything kept flashing back to what [Madden] said to me," Rivera said. "And so I'm driving home that night, on Monday night, I watched the tape like ten times, I was just sick. As I'm driving I'm thinking about this, I run a red light and almost get t-boned. And it just wakes me up."
Beginning the next week and for the rest of the season, Rivera began to go for it on 4th-and-short early in the game and that aggressiveness earned him the “Riverboat Ron” nickname.
When asked by Eisen about the push-pull in dealing with making those tight decisions, Rivera pointed not toward analytics, but momentum.
“Really it’s about momentum and stuff like that,” Rivera said, adding he would talk about decisions (like what is the right time to go for two) with mentor Norv Turner.
“A lot of people say, ‘If you’re down by 14 and you score [to cut it to 8 points late in the game] you should go for two now on your first score,” he said. “Well, if you do that, you just got the momentum back, and now you go for two and you miss, now you’ve lost the momentum… And so I’ve always tried to keep those types of things in mind, in how you do it. So really, it’s about gut feeling to me.
“The analytics are there to really, I guess, just indicate whether or not this is the right time or this is a good time to do it. Cause I’ve had situations when we’ve gone for it, with the analytics, and it didn’t happen out and I’ve been told, ‘hey, that’s ok you did what the analytics said.’ And to me, I struggle with that, because if I did what the analytics said and it said, ‘nine times out of 10 you’re gonna complete it,’ there’s that one time out of 10 you don’t. So how do you know if you’re going to be that one time out of ten that isn’t successful? There is no guarantee. You can tell me all you want, ‘Oh, it’s 99 percent, hey that’s good.’ Yeah, but what if you’re that one percent? What if that one time it doesn’t work? Nobody talks about that until it happens and then it's, oh, it's a bad decision. 'No, it's not a bad decision the numbers...' yeah, but the numbers also said. So you just don't know you can argue it all you want.”
For Washington Football fans, this is not something you want to hear your head coach say.
Rivera seems to indicate he is less inclined to change his thinking when presented with new information based upon math or analytics. And instead, he is more trusting of his own feelings and a belief in momentum – a supposed supernatural force that can't be seen, quantified, or understood – when making football decisions.
While little tingles of intuition can guide you out of a hole, they shouldn't be the main thing a head coach consults. Intuition, experience, and knowledge of past results are important tools in a decision-making process, but only part of a process. And gut feelings shouldn’t carry the most weight.
We call them gut feelings for a reason: They’re made with the gut – the home to our body’s main mechanism for digesting – and not the brain – the home to our body’s center of deductive reasoning and rational thought.
This isn't to say there isn't a place for Rivera's feelings, but he sounds a lot like Stephen Colbert and that's not a good thing: “Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.”
The problem with trusting your gut is that your gut is influenced by emotions and is governed less by rational thought, something analytics are not.
Analytics isn't about finding the 100 percent lock. Rivera is right to say "there is no guarantee" in football, but he's wrong to claim because he math isn't 100 percent certain it can be discounted or ignored. He is making an argument based on outcomes over process.
Good decisions are born of good decision-making processes. Processes based upon quantifiable facts, not ever-changing gut feelings.
And these small-margin decisions can have big consequences. In Washington's 31-23 playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this past year, Rivera made two mistakes in the third quarter. First, he decided to kick a 36-yard field goal on 4th-and-four when down 11. That cost Washington 1.7 percent win probability. On the next possession, Rivera punted on 4th-and-5 from the WFT 47 down 8. That cost the underdogs 1.3 percent win probability. Close calls, but costly ones from a one-score defeat.
Same when going for two after cutting a late-game 14-point deficit to eight. This decision increases a team's win probability by 1.9 percent, but Rivera's gut is telling him to do something which makes it harder for Washington to win.
And it should be noted that while Rivera may have been consulting ‘the book’ back in Buffalo in 2013, he wasn’t consulting the analytics. Kicking a field goal from your opponent’s 21-yard line to go up by six with 1:42 remaining is not what the math suggests you do.
In that instance, Rivera’s gut was telling him the same thing the analytics department would be screaming in his ear: Go for it!
This should have been an easy call for Rivera when he consulted the numbers and his gut. Yes, Rivera's gut feelings and his decades of experience should be a part of his decision-making process. Just don't let feelings be the entire process.
To turn over all decisions to gut feeling would be a recipe for more upset stomachs in the future. As NFL analyst Warren Sharp pointed out, Rivera is 8-18 in one-score games in the last three seasons.
Just some food for thought for your brain and your gut to chew on this offseason.
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