One area where Kevin Stefanski stood out in his rookie season as the Cleveland Browns head coach came in an area where many fans wouldn’t expect it. Stefanski, known for a more conservative style of offense, was unusually aggressive on fourth downs.
Granted it’s just one season, but Stefanski showed his willingness to push the envelope on fourth down much further than most of his coaching peers in 2020. That’s the findings of a study from Football Outsiders, which gauged the relative aggression on fourth downs. Stefanski came in third amongst full-time coaches in 2020.
Focus on the “AI” column in the chart here,
The numbers here can be confusing, so here are the Football Outsiders criteria for judgment,
Aggressiveness Index numbers center around 1.0 and generally describe how much more (or less) likely each coach is to go for it on fourth down compared to his peers; for example, a coach with 1.20 AI is roughly 20 percent more likely to go for it than an average coach historically would in equivalent situations. There are other methodologies now for measuring fourth-down aggressiveness, mostly based on win probability analysis.
In terms of raw data, the Browns went for it on fourth down 23 times in 2020. They were successful on eight of those attempts, though that is not sorted through the criteria filter used by Football Outsiders here. Only 14 of those attempts qualified.
It will be interesting to see if Stefanski keeps up the more aggressive play-calling on fourth down. The move towards analytics across the NFL generally agrees that teams should go for it on fourth down far more often than they actually do.
