BroBible
Chicago Bears fans are elated about their new head coach, Ben Johnson. The former Detroit Lions offensive coordinator was highly-sought-after, and the Bears were able to land their top candidate.
Johnson is part of the newer breed of coaches that is analytics-driven and unafraid of using new data to drive coaching decisions. In fact, he actually was a pioneer in using data and creating data during his stint in Miami.
Before he was the hottest coaching commodity in the NFL, Johnson spent time with Miami Dolphins from 2012-2018 in various roles and under various coaches. He cut his teeth with the Dolphins, and it significantly influenced him to be the coach that he is today.
One area where his influence on the Dolphins was shown was in analytics. It’s hard to remember now, but teams used to be far more conservative when it. came to 4th down decisions. Ben Johnson set out to change that. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Yahoo! article on Ben Johnson.
Johnson believed strongly there was value in being more aggressive on fourth down. Philbin was pretty buttoned up. The Dolphins went for it on fourth down only 27 times in his first 32 games. Remember, this was more than a decade ago, when coaches were far more conservative in deciding to go for it or punt.
Johnson persuaded Philbin to allow him to do a study in the offseason. Before NFL broadcasts had probabilities for every conceivable fourth-down situation, the fledgling assistant with the talent to write code had his own numbers.
“Ben felt strongly enough that he had the right information that we should be more aggressive,” Taylor said. “He could approach things differently and gave a presentation to the whole staff, the data he had put together.”
Think of the history of NFL coaches. It’s full of a lot of guys that you would describe as “football guys”, guys that are old-fashioned, hard-nosed coaches that would hate so-called nerds influencing their decisions. Guys like Ben Johnson, even though he was a college quarterback at UNC, are not cut from that cloth. Usually, guys with math and computer science degrees are hired by NFL teams to do that kind of work. Johnson did it himself.
Who knows if Ben Johnson will be a successful coach in Chicago. But, he’s going to think deeply about the game, that’s for sure.
The post New Chicago Bears Head Coach Ben Johnson Used Coding To Convince Dolphins To Use Analytics appeared first on BroBible.
