Freakonomics Radio - 274. An Egghead’s Guide to the Super Bowl

Episode Date: February 2, 2017

We assembled a panel of smart dudes -- a two-time Super Bowl champ; a couple of NFL linemen, including one who's getting a math Ph.D. at MIT; and our resident economist -- to tell you what to watch for, whether you're a football fanatic or a total newbie.

Super Bowl Sunday has become a sort of secular holiday in the United States, with more than 110 million people watching the game on TV. As with any audience that large, there's bound to be a lot of variance among the viewers. You've got hardcore fans, especially of the teams involved. This year it's the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. You've got the people who like football well enough but aren't fanatics. And then there's a large swath of people who probably don't watch much football at all. They're primarily there for the party and the chicken wings.

Or maybe they're new to this country, or at least new to the sport, and they have no clue as to how American football even works. So we thought, what can we here at Freakonomics Radio do to make this secular holiday a little more enjoyable for everyone? And that's why we've assembled a few very bright people, including two current NFL players, a former player who's a two-time Super Bowl champion, and, because this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. For our Egghead's guide to the Super Bowl, we'll start with our resident Egghead, Steve Levitt. Hey, Dubner. Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. So, Levitt, I've known you a long time, and I know you've written a lot of papers on different sports and elements of sports, sumo wrestling and soccer and sports

gambling, for instance. But honestly, if someone were to ask me, hey, is Steve Leavitt a sports fan? I don't really know. I don't think you actually enjoy watching just to watch or you don't really enjoy rooting for a team or anything plebeian like that, do you? Well, the sad part is I used to. I grew up as a huge sports fan. And then before I wrote papers on sports gambling, I grew up as a huge sports fan. And then before I wrote papers on sports gambling, I did a lot of sports gambling myself. And although sports gambling was really, really fun, the problem with it was that once you start betting on sports, it became, at least for me, I think for most people, hard to maintain any kind of loyalty to the home teams like the

Minnesota Vikings or the twins that I grew up loving so much. And even though I no longer gamble on sports, I've never been able to get back my mojo when it comes to really caring about a team just for the sake of caring about a team. So considering that you don't love watching the game just for the sake of the game or the competition or your team whatever are there ways that you enjoy it anyway or the things that you look for whether they're kind of brain puzzles or kind of bets against yourself to see you know if X happens will Y happen and so on well I don't do anything as intellectual as as all that but I do watch the Super Bowl. And there are at least two things

about the Super Bowl, which at least for me, give me a source of entertainment when I watch the games. Now, the first of these, of course, is the ads. And there's really nothing else in the world like Super Bowl ads. And I don't know why I love the ads so much. It's partly because I know so much effort has gone into them, partly because there's so much creativity, and partly because I always do focus on the intellectual side of wondering whether the ads will actually work. And it's an interesting problem. So in general, it's very hard to figure out whether advertising works. In particular, it's extremely difficult to know whether something

like a Super Bowl ad actually works. And in a time where now this year, I think the 30-second Super Bowl spot will be selling for $5.5 million, it's a good question to ask whether or not indeed the investment that the firms are making in these ads pay off. And so as I watch the ads, I'm always intrigued to think about whether or not there's any conceivable way that the ad that you're seeing might lead to a positive ROI for the advertisers. So that's one thing to think about during the Super Bowl, especially if you're not that interested in the football. But what about the football? Let's introduce the rest of our Egghead panel, all of whom are quite qualified on that front.

My name is John Urschel. I'm a PhD student at MIT in Applied Mathematics, and I also play football for the Ravens in the NFL. Eric Winston. I'm a right tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals. Just finished my 11th year, and I am the president of the NFLPA. Justin Tuck, former NFL defensive end, now warden, NBA student. So we've got in John Urschel, a guy getting his math PhD at MIT while playing in the NFL, in Eric Winston, the president of the NFL Players Union, and in Justin Tuck, a recent retiree with two Super Bowl rings who's now getting his MBA at Wharton. Now, surely their recommendation for what to watch for isn't the same as Steve Levitt's. And yet it is. It does not matter how much or how little football you know,

you will enjoy the commercials, I can assure you. When they go to commercial break, this is not your time to get up and go to the bathroom and go get some chips and dip. Watch the halftime show. It's great. The halftime show is phenomenal. The commercials are great, too. The commercials are really funny. I would tell them to pay attention to the commercials. The

commercials are really good. Okay, so watch the commercials. As for the game itself, we'll start with what to watch for if you know absolutely nothing about the sport of American football. I'd say it's very much similar to rugby. John Urschel, the mathematician. Except some main differences are when you have the ball and you get tackled, they actually stop play. So rugby, you know, it's continuous play. They actually stop play and it's a lot of set pieces, which a lot of people who don't watch football and a lot of international people, they think it's kind of strange.

They think it's kind of slow. But I think the thing to watch for and appreciate is the fact that because football is broken up into these bits of like seven, eight second plays with these breaks in between, in those seven and eight seconds, you get to see so much athleticism and just so much physical talent that it makes it a much higher quality seven or eight seconds broken up than if you watch an entire rugby game throughout or entire soccer game throughout. I can tell you that on every single play, if you watch it closely and you really pay attention to the players, you will see amazing feats of athleticism every single play, which I can't say for every single minute of, say, West Ham versus Arsenal.

I would say if you don't know anything about the game, right, you ought to probably watch the person with the ball. That's Justin Tuck, who played nine seasons with the New York Giants and two with the Oakland Raiders. Obviously, the center has the ball first. He's going to snap it to the quarterback in some capacity, whether he's in shotgun or under center. And then from there, if it's a run play, the quarterback's going to hand the ball to the running back. If it's a pass play, the quarterback's going to drop back and figure out what is the best option for him to disperse the ball to another player. If you actually want to watch the game,

step one, don't bother a guy that's really watching the game to explain it to you. That's Eric Winston. Like that is the worst. Like we can do that at halftime. We can just right in the middle of the series. Don't start pulling, Hey, what's that mean? Or whatever. So that's step one. If you're a novice or youice or you don't really care about the game. I've often been told and read that offensive linemen are, on average, the smartest guys on any football team. Is that true? And if so, why is that true? Of course.

Without a doubt, we're the smartest guys on the field. I like to think we're pretty bright. Urschel is also an offensive lineman. I mean, I hate to judge people just based off their position group, but I like to think we've got some pretty smart guys. Certainly, I would agree with that in that, you know, being an offensive lineman requires more kind of mental function in a given game than, say, playing as a defensive lineman or a linebacker or defensive back. And that's certainly true. You have to know your assignments, know all these plays, be able to see what the defense is doing, make adjustments, and then to be all on the same page, all five of you.

Because all it takes is one of you to mess up, and the whole play is just ruined. As opposed to on defense, all it takes is one of you to make an amazing up, and the whole play is just ruined. As opposed to on defense, all it takes is one of you to make an amazing play, and the whole play is just brilliant. I asked Justin Tuck the same question, if offensive linemen are, on average, the smartest group on the field. He, remember, was a defensive lineman. I would say as a group, they probably are. Really? I can't believe you're giving it to them just like that. Wait, wait, you didn't let me finish. You didn't let me finish.

As individuals, though, I would probably say all the old linemen have to be C-caliber smarts, where you get guys that the center position probably has to be B, B-plus type. Quarterback has to be probably A. But obviously, they're going to say it. I heard you talk to two pretty good ones, so I'll give that to them. For the whole, I'll give that to them. So if you are a football novice

and you're watching the Super Bowl, now you've got a few things in your pocket. Watch the ads, of course. During the game, watch the ball, but also take advantage of the stop-and-start nature of the game, that seven or, but also take advantage of the stop-and-start nature of the game, that seven or eight seconds of amazing athleticism. And finally, if you're looking to impress someone, tell them how the offensive linemen,

the huge gentlemen up front who protect the quarterback and clear the path for runners, how they are probably the brightest guys on the field. All right, then. What if you already know a fair amount about the game? We asked our eggheads what you should watch for. John Urschel first. I think one thing that's always interesting to think about that I think the regular fan who watches a lot of football doesn't kind of put in their head is think about the kind of chess match going on here. Think about the

actual strategies that the team have and try to think about what wins and loses a football game. Because you're a football fan, you watch all these games, you root for your team, you're a diehard fan. But really, what are the fundamental things that win and lose football games and what are the critical moments and how do you know them when they get there? The sort of awareness of, well, how do these wins and losses really, really come about? To that end, Justin Tuck suggests you look for patterns

in how a given team handles different situations as the game goes on. You can figure out, you know, depending on what a team had done earlier in the game, why they would come back to do something, you know, later in the game that way. I would say look at personnel, like whether, you know, normally in third and 10, you know, you're going to be more of a pass and attack type of offense. And obviously on defense, they're going to be more in the nickel packages and trying to stop the pass. Eric Winston has some simple but useful advice for a fairly knowledgeable football fan.

Look who affects the middle of the pocket. Meaning? Meaning that see what team can make the quarterback move horizontally. The quarterbacks to watch this year are Matt Ryan, a great player for most of his eight seasons with the Falcons, but playing in his first Super Bowl, and Tom Brady of the Patriots, playing in his record seventh Super Bowl. Tom does a phenomenal job of what they call stepping up in the pocket, meaning that once the ball has been snapped and the quarterback's looking downfield,

he moves upward in the pocket, usually right to the direction of where the ball was snapped by the center. He steps up and he's looking to make a good throw because it's easier to make a throw when your shoulders are perpendicular to the line of scrimmage and you can follow through. So if you're affecting that ability, especially for Tom, in making him move sideways, he doesn't throw the ball as well. So Matt's a little bit similar to Tom Brady in that sense. He likes to play from the pocket. He likes to be able to step up and make throws. He's used to making throws with some guys on him. He's a big guy. If they're pressuring the middle of the pocket and making Matt Ryan

move around and move laterally, they'll be better for it. If this actual football stuff doesn't move you, Eric Winston has something else to think about, something that comes from playing in the NFL for 11 years and not making it to the Super Bowl. So this is a little factoid that I'm sure a lot of your audience might be interested in. Most players, even though they have the option of buying two tickets and going to the game, won't go. The active players won't go. There's very few players that will go. The

old adage is, you don't go to the Super Bowl until you play in it. And so that's always been most guys' thing. They'll come to Houston to go to some of the parties and do some media engagements and talk to people and meet people. But they leave either Sunday morning to get home so they can watch the Super Bowl or they leave Saturday. Just because it's too hard to sit there and watch it in person? Well, it's just, yeah, it's just one of those things. It's just, it's like a superstition almost. You just don't, you don't go to the Super Bowl until you've, until you've played in

it. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, our eggheads tell you what to watch for if you're really into football or want to seem as if you are. And if you're the kind of person who hears the word football and thinks of soccer, well, we've got that in our Freakonomics Radio archive as well at Freakonomics.com, on iTunes and elsewhere. I would suggest you start with the episode called Why America Doesn't Love Soccer Yet. There's also one called The Longest Long Shot. That's about Leicester City Football Club's amazing Premier League title. Both episodes happen to include my footy-loving teenager, Solomon. And if you're really into it, he and I do a whole separate footy podcast called Footy for Two.

Check it out, and Freakonomics Radio will be right back. How do you watch the Super Bowl? Depends. Depends on how much you care about the teams. Depends who you're watching with. Depends on your level of interest and knowledge. In this Egghead's Guide to the Super Bowl, we've been asking NFL players past and present, Justin Tuck, John Urschel, and Eric Winston, things that anyone can look for. We've already covered the average

football fan and the total newbie, but what should someone who really knows the game watch for? I look at formation. Are they doing a lot of two tight end sets? Are they completely open sets? And what are they? Are they under center quite a bit? I still believe, and they've gone away from this, but I still believe the more you're under center, the more deception you have in your offense. You're able to play action pass more. You're able to do different running plays. I think out of shotgun, you are limited to me in some of the things that you can do. And so I look at that.

I'm looking at the defense, obviously. Are they moving around? Are they stagnant? Are they blitzing a lot? And then once the ball is snapped, I'm watching the front seven, meaning the offensive linemen plus the down linemen and linebackers, and how are they, who's winning there, who's not winning? That was Eric Winston, longtime offensive lineman and current president of the NFL Players Association. And here is advice from John

Urschel, the Ravens offensive lineman, who's also getting his Ph.D. in applied math. I would tell them pick any position that they find interesting, whether it's cornerback or whether it's a certain wide receiver. And you'll really notice more about the game if you just pick a position or even pick a player and just watch that player the entire game just to see what that person's game is like the whole game. Because very often, you know, football fans, even hardcore football fans who know a lot, they're always watching the action and they kind of miss out on the idea of, well, what's this player's day actually like? So if you look at a wide receiver, what is that wide receiver doing on pass plays where the main route combination is not to his side? What is he

doing when it's a run play? Is he running them off? Is he just jogging? Is he talking to the cornerback? What is going on there? Offensive linemen are in the unfortunate position of when on the rare occasion that they make a mistake and are called for holding or motion or something, that is often one of the only times that their name is mentioned on the broadcast and the camera goes to them and so on. It's just an unfortunate situation. Well, no offensive lineman will ever admit this, but since we're talking mathematically, holding happens a lot during a game,

but only gets called. And when it gets called, it's always kind of a little questionable. Should it have been called? Shouldn't have been called? So there's always this risk reward as an offensive lineman for how long you hold for, how hard you hold in terms of how often you get holding calls during the season, as opposed to how much this helps you maintain your block. Do you find that an offensive lineman or a defensive lineman is more prone to fatigue? Defensive linemen, certainly, because they have to run to the football. So an offensive lineman's job is I'm blocking this man

and I'm stopping him from either getting to the quarterback or getting to the running back. And while his job is to get to the quarterback or the running back, so I'm blocking him and suppose the running back runs all the way to the other side, eventually he's going to get off my block. He's never going to get to the guy, but he still has to start running in that direction. If the quarterback throws the ball and a receiver catches it, well, I'm not much good downfield. I'm running downfield, but the defensive lineman has to sprint downfield to try to help to

make the tackle. So they get tired much more quickly than we do. Also, I think there's some fatigue involved in not knowing what's happening. So they have to always be going, always be, you know, aggressive. Whereas I know the play, I know what's going to happen. They have to figure this out. That's such an interesting point because there's a lot of social science research, psychology particularly, that shows that uncertainty is exhausting and people make really poor decisions under uncertainty. So you're saying that even for the defensive,

or for anyone on the defense, I guess, you've got that doubt all game long. Yes, you've got this constant uncertainty. If you ever want to watch smart football players, especially on the defensive side, just pick a defensive end. And that, again, is Justin Tuck, an all-pro defensive end who spent nine seasons with the New York football giants,

including their two Super Bowl wins over the New England Patriots. And most of the time, the defensive ends that are really, really late getting in their stance, they've X'd out plays that they know are not coming. I used to do it all. I learned it from Strahan and Osi when I was playing with those guys. He's talking about Michael Strahan and Osi Uminyura. But I would always get in my stance last second

because I wanted to see what the offense was doing. I wanted to see, do they have trips into the boundary? Is the running back eight yards deep versus six or seven yards deep? Quarterback on the shotgun. What is the hand of the offensive lineman that I'm going against? What is that telling me? How is his foot positioned? Is he blocking down?

Is he blocking towards me? Is his weight back because he wants to kick out because of the pass? Things like that is what experts look at. Are they going in motion to see if we're playing man? Is this a situation where we might get hard counting? Is it third and short? Should I watch the ball more intently than I would if it was third or long? But the better you get at it, the quicker it goes. Once they come to a line of scrimmage, you probably have five seconds at the max, depending on the type of offense you're playing against.

And you have to kind of, you know, decipher all this information like that and be able to go and play. And I think the teams that do that the best are the teams that, you know, play really, really well. When you say you want to go into your stance late, is it because you want to be upright to see better longer or you want to adjust your stance? Both. Okay.

So you're going to, okay. So the more information you have, the more you know what stance you want. Exactly. And, you know, I always told people, like, for example, like we used to have defenses that was kind of like a check with me defense where we would change defenses as the offense changed or so on and so forth. So as a D lineman, I had to listen to guys behind me. And I would tell my linebackers, don't tell me anything once my hand's in the ground,

because once my hand's in the ground, my mind went completely black. And it's more figuring out or focusing on how I beat this guy right in front of me. You know, when I put my hand in the ground, it could be 80,000 people in the stands. I don't hear any of them. So that's one of the reasons why I stood up longer, because, you know, when I put my hand to the ground, it could be 80,000 people in the stands. I don't hear any of them. So that's one of the reasons why I stood up longer because, you know, we would be checking defenses and going from blitzes to cover twos or whatever it may be. And you have to hear that stuff and then adjust to it. And so me standing up or me not putting my hand in the dirt as long as possible gave me a better chance of being able to adjust. How valuable would you say, and I would ask you to kind of put on your NBA hat here,

because now you're thinking about risk reward and all that. How valuable in, let's say, in one given football game is the element of surprise? So, you know, it's like a game theory question. Theoretically, if I, the offense, can surprise you every time, or at least randomize, and I'm ahead of the game. On the other hand, by insisting on wanting to surprise you, I might do things that are not playing to my strengths. So I'm curious, as a defensive player, what you thought of, not necessarily trick plays, but, you know, how much the offense tried to fool you. You know, I think it's a fine line between trying to fool players because you got to think as a defensive player, most of my time isn't spent on the actual field running around trying to stop offenses. Most of my time is spent watching film, trying to figure out,

you know, what their tendencies are. So coming into a football game, I have a pretty good sense of what they like to do in certain situations, which allows me to play really, really fast. But on the other hand, they know that you know that. So that's where the game theory happens, right? So they know that you, Justin Tuck, have watched 12 hours of what, you know, X team is going to do on third and long. And so they know that you know that, then they might want to, you know, outsmart you. Yeah, they might.

But they also are doing something now that they're probably not as good at as well. So I think it's pretty much a similar outcome. You might get me once on that trick play, but the next time you try, you might lose 15 yards and set your offense back. But I also say this, I'm more from the old school where I believe that regardless if they know what I'm doing or not, if I execute what I'm doing better than him, then I'm going to win. So I've always been in the mindset, I don't care if they know what I'm doing. As long as I'm doing it at 100% of my capacity, then I'm fine with that. In terms of outfoxing the other team, or at least trying to optimize your play calling, Steve Leavitt and a colleague

wrote a paper on this very topic. It's called Professionals Do Not Play Minimax, and it analyzed about 125,000 NFL play choices. We found at the time, which was about five or six, seven years ago, we found that teams systematically ran the ball too much. That given the outcomes of plays,

it looked like if teams were to pass a lot more than they did, things would actually get better. And I can't say that it is actually causal. I doubt that the NFL football teams read our paper and dramatically changed the way they did things. But I am happy to report that in the years since we wrote that paper, there was a dramatic increase in the share of plays from scrimmage that became passes versus runs when that trend hadn't been there at all prior to our writing. So maybe I should take credit for it, even though it's almost certainly impossible that I have made NFL football more

efficient. Steve Levitt has one more piece of advice for anyone watching the Super Bowl, regardless of interest level. The beauty of the Super Bowl is that you can virtually gamble on any aspect of it. So not just the final score, who will win, but even who will win the opening coin toss. And I remember one year you could actually bet on whether Jay-Z would also appear

along with Beyonce in the halftime show. And so if you want to have some fun, you can go to a sportsbook. You can look at the literally hundreds of different betting options that are there. And without even the trouble of going and making an account of the sportsbook, I would suggest you find a friend and you divvy up the bets and you bet on, you know, 50 or 75 things and you keep track of who wins what. And it can keep you busy for the entire game. And if it's the sort of thing where you don't get any pleasure out of taking money from your friends, then I would suggest that you find one of your enemies and you actually divvy up all the bets with one of your enemies

so that if you actually happen to win a lot, you can take great joy in that outcome. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio. Nobody gets to the NFL or succeeds at any level without a certain amount of stick-to-itiveness, otherwise known as grit. What specifically are gritty people like? What do they do when they wake up in the morning? What beliefs do gritty people walk around with in their heads? How to get more grit in your life? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

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