COSTA MESA, Calif. — Brandon Staley is sitting on a couch in his corner office at the Chargers’ facility, freshly brewed coffee in hand. He is wearing a casual offseason outfit — sneakers, shorts, a thin baby blue dri-fit hoodie and a black BNP Paribas Open hat.
He considers a question about the value of understanding mathematical advantages.
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“There’s a really powerful part of this book that has stayed with me …”
Staley stands up and walks over to the bookcase along the back wall of the office, next to his desk. He kneels and scans the shelf with his index finger until he finds what he is looking for — “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis. Staley pulls it out and starts flipping through the pages as he walks back to the couch and sits down again. With the book resting on his lap, he turns page after page, searching for a specific passage.
His goal here is to teach — he is the son of educators, after all. His mother, Linda, who died in 2004 after a long battle with breast cancer, taught sixth-grade English. His father, Bruce, taught fourth grade for a few years before starting a second career.
The only noise in the office is the flip, flip, flip of turning pages until Staley finds the passage he is looking for and reads aloud. “The new definition of a nerd,” he recites. “A person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”
He looks up.
“Your instincts aren’t better than everybody on Earth,” Staley says. “Do I think one of the big reasons why I became the head coach of the Chargers is because I’ve got instincts? Yes.
“But do I think that when it comes to making these premium decisions in the heat of the moment that, man, my instincts are so much better than everybody else, and I would do a perfect job if I didn’t have any information? There’s just no way.”
For most of football history, coaches have made game-management decisions using nothing more than tradition and gut feelings. Staley, 39, is as well versed in this history as any person on the planet. He is a walking football encyclopedia. He has read Bill Polian’s “Super Bowl Blueprints” cover to cover more times than he can count.
Staley is also determined to find advantages wherever he can, to better his team and give his players the best opportunities to be successful, even if it means admitting what he does not know. Staley sees a potential advantage in the admission — and in acquiring as much information as he can from as many resources as possible, in knowing his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
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We are discussing fourth downs, opportunities gained and lost in an eventful 2021 season that fell just short, and the dreaded, polarizing word that has caused arguments and outrage across sports for most of this century.
Analytics — people in and around football spend countless hours dissecting the topic. But when the dissection happens, analytics are rarely defined as what they actually are: more information.
“I think the problem with ‘analytics,’ when you use that word, immediately somebody is feeling something, and they shouldn’t be,” Staley says. “If it was another term that people were more comfortable with, then there would be a different response. But analytics has … it’s like, well, it doesn’t belong in ball. It belongs in the CIA. It belongs in investment banking. It doesn’t belong in sports. And that’s not true. Information has been how people have been making judgments in this game since Paul Brown and Vince Lombardi were coaching.
“What we try to do is try to use data to make better decisions.”
For Staley, that process started in the winter of 2021, before he went for it on fourth down at a higher rate than any coach in the league, before his in-game decisions helped propel the Chargers to the cusp of the postseason and before the fierce backlash of the NFL world came crashing down on the then-rookie head coach when his team came up one win (or tie) short.
Staley believes in math, but he also acknowledges there is a part of the game numbers cannot and may never be able to quantify. Mindset. Emotions. Effort. The human element. And the driving force in Staley’s approach to in-game decision-making was rooted in that understanding.
“There has to be a fearlessness to play in this game, and what I wanted to establish was that,” Staley says. “The history of this team when I got here, it was like someone’s going to get hurt, they’re going to blow a lead, something catastrophic is going to happen. There’s this ‘Chargering’ thing. There’s all of these external factors that I know in my life, they’re just all excuses. They’re just all excuses.
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“And so, how do you change that? Well, you have to do things different, you have to have a different approach. … Our mindset’s going to be on us, it’s not going to be on the opponent. It’s going to be on us. So creating that fearless mindset of, we are going to be aggressive, we’re going to put the ball in our hands, we’re going to trust our guys to make plays.
“If we lose, we’re going to do it on our terms, not someone else’s terms.”
It was crucial to Staley to instill that mindset in all of his players. But it was most crucial for his rising star quarterback Justin Herbert, who was set to enter his second pro season after an eye-opening rookie campaign. Whether he failed or succeeded, Herbert needed to experience the pressure. He needed to face the do-or-die realities of the NFL head on.
“The first person that I was thinking about was Justin. I wasn’t thinking about anything or anybody else,” Staley says. “For me, I came into this and I said, I know I have a special quarterback. I also know part of my responsibility is to train him. Part of my responsibility is to get him ready. And I also know that if I take the ball out of his hands, I know what that’s going to do, too.
“For him to grow and be as good as he’s going to be, he needs to be in these pressure-packed moments. Whether he throws it or not, it’s not the point. It’s that the ball is in his hands, it’s in our hands as a team, and that is where it all started for me.”
For his vision to be executed, Staley felt he needed to institute a clear plan for streamlined communication on game days.
Only six people would be involved in game-management discussions on the headsets. Staley and his three coordinators — offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, defensive coordinator Renaldo Hill and then-special teams coordinator Derius Swinton — plus two staffers devoted exclusively to game-management strategy, director of football research and analytics Aditya Krishnan and offensive assistant Dan Shamash, who had previous game management experience on Anthony Lynn’s staff. (Shamash was hired away in the offseason by Robert Saleh to be the Jets’ situational football and game management coordinator.)
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“Those (six) people are in complete alignment in terms of how we’re going about these decisions,” Staley says. “You don’t have time to have a big powwow. You don’t have time to have this intricate back and forth on a headset during a game.”
Next, Staley constructed the mechanics of the fourth-down decision-making in a “yes, unless” system.
At the start of each series of downs on offense, win-probability models from the Chargers football research department would indicate the number of yards the offense would have to gain on first, second and third down to make it a go-for-it — or “green,” in the team’s lexicon — decision.
Say the Chargers have a first-and-10 from their own 40-yard line. And say the model indicates that they would increase their win probability by going for it on fourth down as long as they have 4 or fewer yards to gain. That information is communicated to all relevant parties, including Lombardi. Lombardi can then call plays on first, second and third down knowing that if he gets to fourth-and-4 or less, the Chargers are going for it — unless Staley says otherwise.
“You can be a better decision-maker if you have things modeled ahead of time,” Staley says. “You have to go into the game with a plan, and then that way you’re saying, ‘No,’ as opposed to deciding yes or no. I’m going into it saying, we’re doing this unless.”
With the infrastructure built, the Chargers entered the 2021 season.
“It’s not just about that one down on fourth down,” Staley says. “It’s what happened on the previous three. And that changes the way you play, and it changes the way they have to play you. And that’s what I wanted to do, was use mindset and math to our advantage.”
Back in his office, Staley is quoting “The Mighty Ducks.”
He references a scene from the 1992 classic in which protagonist Gordon Bombay, a defense attorney who takes over coaching a youth hockey team to fulfill a court-mandated community service sentence, is talking to one of his players, Charlie Conway. Bombay was a star player as a kid, and he rehashes a painful childhood memory of a potential winning penalty shot hitting the post in a championship game.
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“A quarter of an inch this way and it would have gone in,” Bombay says in the scene. “A quarter of an inch, Charlie!”
“Well, yeah,” Charlie replies, “but a quarter of an inch the other way and you would have missed completely.”
Staley recites the exchange nearly word for word from memory as he discusses the 2021 Chargers season, when Los Angeles missed the playoffs after losing three of its final four games, including two losses in prime time.
They entered their Week 15 Thursday night game against the Chiefs with a chance to take over first place in the AFC West but fell in overtime after going for it on five of their six fourth downs, only converting twice.
Three weeks later, in the final game of the season at Las Vegas on Sunday night, the Chargers had a chance to make the playoffs with a win or tie. They lost to the Raiders in overtime. They went for it on seven of their 12 fourth downs, though five of those came in desperation situations in the fourth quarter and overtime.
One failed attempt — a third-quarter fourth-and-1 from the Chargers’ own 18-yard line when Austin Ekeler was dropped for a 2-yard loss on a run — was a sticking point in the Monday morning quarterbacking that followed. And the failed fourth downs in prime-time games became the lasting images for what had been a promising season.
“I take full responsibility for those two games,” Staley says. “There’s nobody that was more devastated, that was more crushed by us losing. We’re going to learn a lot from those two games. But we’re going to learn a lot from all the games that we played in.”
That includes wins over the Chiefs (Week 3), Raiders (Week 4), Browns (Week 5), Eagles (Week 9) and Bengals (Week 13), in which the offense went a collective 9-for-12 on fourth down.
“You have to accept it can go both ways,” Staley says. “And you’re ready for it.”
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In total, the Chargers went for it on 34 of 108 fourth downs across 17 games — a 31.5 percent go rate that was the highest in the league. Despite the high rate, the Chargers were tied for fourth in fourth-down conversion rate at 64.7 percent, making them the only team in the league with a go rate over 25 percent and a conversion rate over 60 percent.
The Chargers were highly productive on all fourth downs, despite having one of the worst punt units in the league and a field goal unit that only found its footing over the second half of the season after the team replaced kicker Tristan Vizcaino with Dustin Hopkins.
Expected points added (EPA), widely used to measure and compare efficiency in all three phases, uses historical situational data — like down, distance, score and time of game — to produce a point total a team is expected to produce on a given play. After that play, a new expected points total can be calculated based on the same factors. By subtracting the second total from the first total, you are left with the number of expected points produced on a single play.
The Chargers ranked third in the league in EPA/play on fourth downs — by going for it, punting and attempting field goals — despite ranking 25th in total EPA on punts and 16th in total EPA on field goals, according to TruMedia.
“I don’t think I’m smarter than everybody else,” Staley says. “I believe in myself. I believe in how we do things.”
Imagine you are a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” You have made it to the final question. One more correct answer and you win $1 million. The question pops up, along with your four possible multiple choice options. You are stumped. You have no clue. Luckily, you have kept one of your lifelines — phone a friend.
Now answer this: Do you make the call to get someone else’s opinion? What is the downside in gathering as much information as possible before making your million-dollar decision?
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The same logic should apply to any decision — even the ultra-high-stakes ones NFL head coaches must make every week in the fall: the more information, the better. And that is where the Chargers football research department comes in.
At the time of his hiring, the Chargers only had one full-time analytics staffer in the building, Krishnan, whom they hired from the Browns as director of football research in March 2020. In July 2021, the Chargers hired Alex Stern, a former consultant for the University of Virginia football team who was a finalist at the 2020 NFL Big Data Bowl — the league’s annual analytics contest — and an honorable mention in 2021.
“When you say analytics, it’s like, well, that’s an outsider’s view of the game,” Staley says. “But there are people that really care about the game that are really smart. They may not be a coach, they may not be a player, they may not be an executive or front office, but they have a real place in the game.”
Krishnan and Stern are responsible for producing the weekly game-specific win probability models Staley uses to inform the team’s strategic decisions. The models include myriad factors, like score, time of game, down, distance, weather conditions, adjusted point spread, injury reports and histories, opposing quarterback, home vs. road game, kicking and punting efficiency and more.
The models give Staley a mathematical indication of how much value the Chargers are gaining inherently in a fourth-down decision, before the play happens. That failed fourth-and-1 from the season finale in Las Vegas is a worthy example. And we can use Ben Baldwin’s fourth-down bot — an open source win probability model — as a framework.
Inputting the relevant parameters — score (Chargers down 3), quarter (third), time remaining (8:57), field position (own 18), and yards to go (1) — Baldwin’s win probability model gave the Chargers a 41 percent chance of winning the game if they punted. If they successfully gained that yard and converted the fourth down, their chances of winning the game would jump to 49 percent. If they failed to convert, their chances of winning the game would fall to 32 percent.
—> LAC (14) @ LV (17) <—
LAC has 4th & 1 at the LAC 18Recommendation (STRONG): 👉 Go for it (+3 WP)
Actual play: 👉 A.Ekeler up the middle to LAC 16 for -2 yards (D.Philon). pic.twitter.com/Xo1e5M9Wtv— 4th down decision bot (@ben_bot_baldwin) January 10, 2022
The next step is calculating the chances the Chargers have of converting the fourth-and-1. In this case, Baldwin’s model gave the Chargers a 71 percent chance of converting this fourth down. (For context, the league average conversion rate on fourth-and-1s was 68.1 percent last season.)
Next, take the difference in win probability between a successful conversion and a failed conversion — in this case, 17 percent or .17. Multiple that by the probability of conversion — 71 percent or .71 — and you get 12 percent. Add that to the win probability in the case of a failed conversion — 32 percent + 12 percent — and you get 44 percent, three percentage points higher than the win probability if the Chargers punted.
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In other words: According to Baldwin’s model, the Chargers had a 3 percent better chance of winning the game by going for it than by punting.
The Chargers’ team-specific and game-specific models are more nuanced than Baldwin’s more general model that calculates win probability for every fourth-down decision from every game all season. More factors come into play — weather, kicking situations, opposing quarterback metrics, injury reports and history, etc. The Chargers also tailor their models based on how Staley wants to play in a given week, either more conservative or more aggressive.
The win probability figures are relayed to Staley and the rest of the coaches involved in game management at the beginning of a new series of downs — the “yes, unless” system — as opposed to fourth down. Staley then has final say and can do whatever he sees fit. There is no chart or sheet, just more information put into the headset of the head decision-maker. And while he trusts the math, there is always more to the decision than just numbers. That was the case with the fourth-and-1 decision in Las Vegas, too.
“When we make this, we’re going to tell that team, ‘This is our game to win, not yours,'” Staley remembers thinking in that moment. “‘It’s our game to win.'”
Mindset, then math.
Most often, those two things aligned. According to Baldwin’s model, Staley faced 17 fourth-down decisions in which he would gain at least 3 percent in win probability by going for it. He went for it on 12 of those decisions. The Chargers failed to convert four of those 12 fourth downs, including Ekeler’s run against the Raiders. Staley says he is not so process-oriented that he “can be immune to the result.”
“You can’t be blind and say, ‘Oh man, I’m so proud of that decision. It didn’t work out, but I can live with that,'” he says. “There’s a reality to the result. And I think as a leader, you do have to factor that in, because there’s this thing called morale and buy-in that really matters. And that’s something that you have to take very seriously, and that’s something that is incumbent upon me to communicate to our entire team and make sure that you don’t ever cross that line.”
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Buy-in. Morale. Mindset. The unquantifiable human element of the game.
“It’s not about me,” Staley says. “The mindset, it’s not about one person. It’s about our team.”
The loss in Las Vegas showed both sides of this coin. The fourth-and-1 attempt was the right mathematical decision. But even Staley now admits that he noticed a letdown from his offense after the failed Ekeler run, and the Chargers went three-and-out on their next two possessions.
In the fourth quarter, though, the Chargers, led by Herbert, staged an epic comeback, storming back from 15 points down with 8:23 remaining. Joey Bosa sacked Derek Carr on a third-and-6 to force a punt in the Raiders’ final possession of regulation, then Herbert tied the game with a 12-yard touchdown pass to Mike Williams on the final play of regulation. Herbert had a perfect passer rating on fourth down in the game
For Staley, his vision for forging an unflappability among his players had been realized in this comeback.
Even if it ultimately fell short, does it happen if Staley does not prioritize a fearless mindset in his players from his very first day on the job? There is no mathematical model in the world that can answer that question.
“For me, coming here to this team and what I had heard about this team. I knew that mindset was something that I was going to have to establish — and that I wanted to establish,” Staley says, “And I think we’re in the process of doing it.”
Staley is reading another passage from “The Undoing Project.”
“Lung cancer proved to be a handy example,” he quotes. “Lung cancer doctors in the early ’80s faced two unequally unpleasant options: surgery or radiation. Surgery was more likely to extend your life, but unlike radiation, it came with the small risk of instant death.
“When you told people that they had a 90 percent chance of surviving surgery, 82 percent of the patients opted for surgery. But when you told them that they had a 10 percent chance of dying from the surgery, which was of course just a different way of putting the same odds, only 54 percent chose the surgery.”
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He looks up.
“I think that’s a big part of the language of football,” he says. “Think about science itself. Sports does an even worse job of framing. People don’t always have a good reference point to help them frame some of these decisions.”
Staley starts scanning again, flipping pages, reading sentences to himself under his breath. Then he finds another passage he wants to share.
“The understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t know how to communicate anything,” he reads aloud. “Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real.”
He looks up again.
“That’s the real issue,” he says. “They don’t think these probabilities are real.”
But they are. And they could be the difference between winning and losing.
“Facts are what bring people together,” Staley says. “When I tell J.C. Jackson that a wide receiver catches 90 percent of his passes outside the numbers, that math should matter to him. When I tell Justin Herbert that over 70 percent on third-and-4-to-6, they pressure, that should matter to him. That math should matter to them. It doesn’t mean that on those 4-to-6s it’s always going to be pressure and vice-versa. But it’s part of the calculation.”
Staley held exit interviews with his players, the people who brought his mindset to life, in his office after the season. Veterans came in and delivered Staley a message, as he recalls: “Don’t you ever change. Don’t you even think about it.”
Staley had hoped to build belief among his players. And as the Chargers turn to a new season, one with Super Bowl aspirations buoyed by a defensive overhaul, it is that belief that permeates. The returning players have it. The new faces — like Jackson, Khalil Mack, Sebastian Joseph-Day, Kyle Van Noy and Bryce Callahan — want to be a part of this team because of it.
“Where we are now, we are different because of that. It’s the mindset that got us here,” Staley says. “This is a different group out here than last year, and it’s not just because of the additions. It’s because of what we accomplished last year and what we didn’t accomplish.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Matthew Stockman, Keith Birmingham / Getty Images)
