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4th down decision making is, in general, a proxy for a football coach’s overall aggressiveness. In today’s NFL, it is the one area where a head coach ultimately has the sole responsibility for a major decision, and there is more data than ever available for coaches to put to use in order to evaluate a given situation and make an informed choice.
Unfortunately, it appears that lately Matt LaFleur isn’t looking at the numbers at all.
The Green Bay Packers’ head coach has had ups and downs in terms of his aggressiveness on 4th down over his tenure with the team. He was one of the more aggressive coaches on 4th downs in his early years, frequently ranking among the best coaches in terms of going for it when it made sense to do so; however, his numbers dipped precipitously in 2024, when Jordan Love dealt with multiple injuries during his second year as the Packers’ starting quarterback.
Football writer Ben Baldwin runs the website RBSDM.com and the social media account “NFL 4th Down Bot,” which chart every 4th down situation in every NFL game. They use a model that maps each situation to an average team’s win probability based on the score and time of the game, field position, likelihood of picking up a first down, and average rate of hitting a field goal. The most critical number that Baldwin calculates is the win probability that a decision would add or subtract simply by making the decision to keep an offense on the field rather than punting or attempting a field goal.
Deciding on a win probability threshold is perhaps the most important part of analyzing 4th down decisions: How much WP does a decision need to add for it to be a “yes, you should almost certainly go for it” decision, versus a toss-up?
For my purposes here, I will look at decisions where keeping the offense on the field would add at least 2% of win probability, and when the team’s win probability is still at least 10 percent (in other words, eliminating some garbage time when a team has no choice but to go on 4th down because they are trying to mount an unlikely comeback).
In those situations, the Packers have been the 8th-most aggressive team in “clear-go” situations since 2019, when LaFleur took over. However, that result is almost entirely driven by the 2020 through 2023 seasons. In 2019, his first year, LaFleur was the 4th-least aggressive coach, and in 2024 he was the 2nd-least aggressive. This year he remains more in the middle of the pack, but a few specific instances illustrate that he is operating almost exclusively on feeling rather than on data in 2025.
4th down analyses generally look at whether coaches are too conservative when they should be aggressive, rather than the opposite: examining when a team is being too aggressive when the situation does not warrant it. But in fact, the decision to go for it on 4th-and-8 early...
