Ducks burned as gambles backfire

We know that the nerds have taken over sports at the highest levels, wielding their fancy spreadsheets full of probabilities while telling generations of coaches that they were foolish for relying on instincts and experience.

It’s an interesting and never-ending debate, especially in a sport like football where the data and analytics will often steer coaches in directions that run counter to common sense and the way the human mind typically processes risk vs. reward.

The most successful coaches are probably those who blend the two. It’s good to understand the data and use it to inform decisions, but it’s bad to be beholden to numbers.

In the end, these are games played by human beings and not computers. You need some human wisdom to understand context.

Football coaches generally have used that data to become more aggressive in their play-calling and decision-making. Dan Lanning, the 37year old coach at Oregon, uses it as a shield for outright recklessness.

Lanning made three crucial decisions Saturday that might have looked good to the analytics crowd but turned out to play a huge role in No. 8 Oregon’s 36-33 loss at No. 6 Washington.

The first: On the final play of the first half, Lanning went for a fourthand-goal from the 3-yard line rather than take an easy field goal that would have cut Washington’s lead to 22-21. It didn’t work and was the most egregious of the three since there wasn’t much upside to chasing points that early in the game.

The second: Trailing 29-18, Lanning again went for a fourth-and-3 instead of the automatic field goal, this time from the 8-yard line. It again didn’t work.

The third: After clawing back to lead 33-29, Lanning went for a fourthand-3 from Washington’s 47 with just a bit more than two minutes left, trying to salt away the game. It didn’t work, and Washington scored the winning touchdown just two plays later from excellent field position.

You can make a decent pro or con case for each of those three decisions. But when the pattern of outright aggression backfires so spectacularly, you open yourself up for major-second guessing.

It’s also worth mentioning that last season, Lanning took a massive gamble with 1:26 left in a tie game by going for a fourth-and-1 from Oregon’s own 34-yard line. That didn’t work either, essentially handing Washington a game-winning field goal.

If the Ducks miss the College Foot

ball Playoff by that thin margin, there should be a ton of regret about Lanning’s appetite for risk.

And it’s why Oregon is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst about the state of their favorite program.

Four more in misery

● Colorado: The only thing the Buffaloes have done wrong is make a lot of people think they were something more than a middling team whose rebuild would take much longer than one season.

And Colorado has some blame in that, as players and even Deion Sanders himself leaned into the “Do you believe now?” rhetoric after a couple surprising wins to open his tenure.

But what makes Colorado a true Misery Index candidate this week amidst what has been an overall success story? It’s a nasty combination of dramatically raised expectations followed by a swift regression to the mean, capped by one of the worst collapses you’ll see all season.

The Buffaloes were up 29-0 at halftime Friday against Stanford. They lost 46-43 in the second overtime.

At 4-3, with four more games against ranked teams, the odds are now against Colorado making a bowl game.

● Auburn: When you hire Hugh Freeze, you are asking your fan base to put up with a lot. But once you get past the jokes about the scandal that got him fired at Ole Miss, the televangelist vibes, the alarmingly undisciplined use of social media and his off-putting compulsion toward trying to make people like him, the reward is supposed to be a great offense.

That was the deal Auburn made with its fan base when it brought in Freeze over the objections of a loud minority. It is the deal Freeze is not living up to in his first season as Auburn sits at 3-3 following a 48-18 loss at LSU.

To be somewhat fair, Freeze inherited personnel problems from the stunningly overmatched Bryan Harsin, who didn’t understand what it took to compete in the SEC and had the results to show it. So nobody expected immediate greatness under Freeze. But bad and fun is a pretty decent alternative, and Freeze hasn’t even delivered that.

If you set aside the wins over Massachusetts and Samford, Auburn is averaging a stunning 15.5 points per game.

●West Virginia: The only thing more painful than losing on a 49-yard Hail Mary is losing on a 49-yard Hail Mary to your former coach who left for a lesser program in a worse conference.

Certainly, that’s how West Virginia fans felt about Dana Holgorsen, who spent eight mostly successful years at West Virginia before going to Houston, which at the time was a member of the American Athletic Conference. In reality, it was probably time for Holgorsen to move on because he had plateaued in Morgantown and was trending toward the hot seat in that job.

Still, hard feelings never quite go away for a fan base when a coach leaves voluntarily, and the only solace for the Mountaineers was that Holgorsen’s tenure at Houston had been incredibly underwhelming before they met Thursday night as Big 12 peers.

Pittsburgh: It has been a terrible year for the Panthers, but no loss has been more embarrassing than the conversation around a blue vase that was in the lobby of their practice facility this week.

The short version is that local media members reported the vase was there because that’s where players were supposed to put their negative thoughts when they entered the building. Naturally, Pitt fans and many fans of other teams made fun of this because it’s incredibly stupid.

But Pat Narduzzi, the Panthers’ coach, said that characterization wasn’t accurate. According to Inside the Panthers, Narduzzi had a winding explanation that goes back to a 1921 novel called “The Go-Getter” about a World War I veteran who comes home, gets a job and is instructed to buy a vase for his boss.

The veteran has to endure all kinds of obstacles along the way but finally gets the job done and passes the test, which somehow was supposed to be inspirational for a bad football team that was 1-4 going into this week. Coaches will try anything during tough times, so it was worth a shot. And guess what? Pitt blew out previously unbeaten Louisville, 3821. But here’s the problem. If the vase is what turned around your season, that’s probably not something you should admit.