The Aggressive Mindset of the Lions and Bills

Your Game of the Week is the Detroit Lions versus the Buffalo Bills, a potential Super Bowl preview. That’s not just usual AFC versus NFC hyperbole, either – our playoff odds currently give the Lake Erie Bowl a 12.6% chance of happening, highest of any matchup in the league. The Lions and Bills, two of the longest-suffering franchises in the league, being favorites to reach the Super Bowl? Surely, the end times are upon us.

If we can glance into our crystal ball for a moment, we might suggest that this one will come down to a key fourth-down conversion. The Bills and Lions are in the top six in successful fourth-down conversions this season, as both Dan Campbell and Sean McDermott have embraced the more aggressive mindset. The Bills have the best fourth-down conversion percentage in the league at 88%, while the Lions managed to overcome a Packers team that outgained them by 1.5 yards per play by converting four of five fourth downs last week. Fourth-down aggression may be more of an identity for Detroit than it is for Buffalo, but both teams have made it as far as they have in large part to their fourth-down philosophies.

This is an important enough part of this matchup that it’s worth diving in a little on the FTN StatsHub, where we can slice and dice all of our advanced stats by down and distance. Just how good have the Bills and Lions been on fourth down – are they just the best on fourth down? Or is it their willingness to play into risk and be aggressive giving them an edge over more cautious coaches? A philosophical edge rather than a skill edge? Let’s dive in.

We must caution that fourth-down splits are very small sample sizes, but it’s a good place to start. Both the Bills and Lions are ahead of league average in fourth-down DVOA, but there is a notable gap between them.

The Bills have basically not put a foot wrong on fourth down all year long. Their two failures were on a fourth-and-3 against Indianapolis where Zaire Franklin broke up a pass intended for Curtis Samuel, and a fourth-and-3 against the Chiefs where Chamarri Conner disrupted Dawson Knox and intercepted the ensuing overthrow. Every attempt from 1-2 yards has succeeded this season. They’re the only team in football that can make that claim.

Saying the Bills are good on fourth down, though, is a little bit misleading. What this actually represents is Buffalo realizing they have Josh Allen, Josh Allen is very good, and they should let Josh Allen do what he wants. All 16 Bills fourth-down attempts have involved Allen in some way – eight pass attempts, six sneaks and two scrambles. Only the Tush Pushin’ Eagles have called more fourth-down sneaks than the Bills this year, and they’ve been stuffed once. Every single Allen sneak has worked. To be fair, most fourth-down sneaks have worked this year – only three have actually been stopped, because if you’re close enough to sneak, many quarterbacks can pick up that extra yard. But the Bills have more confidence in Allen doing it than most teams do, and are more willing to risk Allen going for it than most teams do, and have reaped the benefits.

Buffalo doesn’t go for it much on fourth-and-medium. No matter what fourth-down odds calculator you use, be it ESPN’s, RBSDM’s, or otherwise, you’ll see the Bills passing up on recommended goes on fourth down on a regular basis. Not any more than your average team, mind you, but also not any less than your average team. When it comes to fourth-and-short, however, they put their trust in their MVP-caliber quarterback at a higher rate than most teams, and have reaped the benefit.

The Lions, on the other hand, do not shy away from fourth-and-mediums. Or fourth-and-longs. Or fourth and, well, just about anywhere on the football field. If anything, they’ve been too aggressive this season. Both the ESPN and RBSDM calculators called Detroit’s decision to go for it on fourth down at the end of the Packers game a mistake, and one commentator, perhaps overexcited in the heat of the moment, called it one of the worst coaching decisions he had ever seen. It has since come out that Jared Goff campaigned to go for it on fourth, and then slipped and nearly blew the play up before it started, but the gamble paid off, the Lions converted the fourth down, and kicked the game winning field goal without giving the ball back to the Packers. Fair play.

The really interesting thing here is that the Lions aren’t particularly great on fourth downs. They’re certainly not bad or anything, but they don’t stand out in the numbers. It’s not just a small sample-size thing, either; if anything, the Lions’ fourth-down DVOA flatters them in the small sample size. We can expand our sample size by looking at third-and-fourth and shorts, just to make sure we’re not overly weighting a handful of plays. The Lions only have a 1.5% offensive DVOA on third or fourth with three or fewer yards to go, which ranks 17th. They manage just 0.12 EPA/play in the running game, which ranks 24th. They are much better at throwing the ball in these situations – a 37.4% DVOA and 0.77 EPA/play are both in the top quartile of the league – but Sonic and Knuckles keep running into spikes and seeing their rings scattered across the field in short yardage situations. Both Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery are in the top four in rushing DYAR and DVOA this season, but Gibbs drops from first in DVOA to fifth in these short yardage situations, and Montgomery plummets from fourth to 24th with a -16.0% DVOA. He’s just one of four running backs this year to have multiple fourth-down failures.

We don’t want to over-stress this. Detroit has a very good offense, and even their most negative splits are usually fairly solid. The point, however, is that it’s not like the Lions are some generational fourth-down converting team. They aren’t so amazing in short -yardage situations that it makes sense that other teams wouldn’t go for it as frequently as they would. They don’t have a significant personnel advantage that they’re taking advantage of, like the Bills are with Josh Allen. The Lions are merely good on fourth downs and are willing to lean into it.

I would love for there to be some other salient point that could be made here. One commonly shared theory is that the Lions’ willingness to go on fourth frees up play calling on earlier downs. The argument is that the Lions can use more of the playbook because they know they’ll go for fourth down if they get close on third down. That may or may not be true, but it’s not really showing in the data. The Lions aren’t particularly good on third downs that don’t covert (ninth with a -146.7% DVOA). There’s maybe a slight increase in failed completion yards on third downs – catches that don’t convert. Detroit averages 6.6 yards and a -36.1% DVOA on those kinds of plays, but that still leaves an average of 5.4 yards to go on fourth, which ranks 13th. They don’t take extra deep shots on third downs knowing they have fourth downs remaining. They don’t call an excessively large amount of draws on third-and-long knowing they’ll have a fourth play. If there is something there, it’s very minimal, and you have to slice and dice the data to try squeeze anything out of it. It really does look to be as simple as it is on the surface – good NFL teams should go for it on fourth down far more than they do, and Dan Campbell and the Lions are just the team that understand that more than anyone else.

It is a high-risk, high-reward strategy, and it might be best if Detroit occasionally played to minimize variance. Most of Detroit’s fourth down decisions have been right in a vacuum, but when you start piling play after play after play together, you’re increasing the odds that something will go wrong. This was, essentially, the criticism of the Lions in last year’s NFC Championship Game. Going strictly by win probability, Detroit’s two fourth-down attempts in the second half of the game were the correct calls; over the course of a full season, the Lions should win more games than they lose by going for it in those sorts of situations. But they didn’t play a full season – they played one game. It is unlucky that Goff was incomplete on both attempts, but they did happen, and San Francisco converted both of those failed fourths into touchdowns in a game they ended up winning by three. There are times where it is worth sacrificing a couple of points of win probability on the top to minimize the chances of a huge swing the other way.

I, too, would have gone for it both times against San Francisco – you live by the fourth, you die by the fourth – but against Green Bay, the risk of giving the Packers the ball needing just a field goal to win against the reward of draining the last 30 seconds of the clock was not worth the benefit. The downside to kicking a field goal was giving the Packers the ball back in a situation they almost surely would have merely attempted to tie the game in. “We might go to overtime” is a much safer backup plan than “we might lose the game in regulation.” Yes, going and succeeding on fourth down sealed the game for Detroit last week. But the risk, the downside, was too great for such little benefit.

That being said, how nice is it to be criticizing an NFL coach for being too aggressive? Campbell’s decision making and the attitude the Lions bring with them on fourth down is a huge part of their success. A more conventional coach would have lost last week to the Packers because they wouldn’t have gone for it all the times Campbell did when it was the right call; it’s worth noting that four of the Lions’ six touchdowns against Green Bay this year have come on fourth down. If the trade-off for that is a few butt-clenching moments when Detroit decides to let it ride one too many times, I think you can live with that.