Was Fourth-And-1 Reid's Fault?

Lehigh Valley Express-Times writer Nick Fierro was unimpressed by Andy Reid's performance on Sunday, stating that [1] the team's performance against the Bears was, "...yet another case was made for the argument that head coach Andy Reid will never lead this team to the promised land."

Fierro pushes some of the blame for the team's loss on the players -- singling out DeSean Jackson for his muffed punt and incorrectly-run route, and giving Kyle Orton credit for his touchdown pass to Devin Hester, but where the criticism of Reid comes in is, strangely, the Eagles' inability to run the ball in from the 1-yard line late in the game.

Fierro writes:

But the failure to punch it in from the 1-yard line late in the game had Reid's faulty fingerprints all over it. This is where the Eagles had a chance to overcome all the mistakes they made earlier and beat an inferior team they're supposed to beat no matter what. It's where true championship teams come through nine out of 10 times, a ratio Reid seems doomed to never achieve unless he never makes another mistake for the rest of his career and coaches until he's something like Joe Paterno's age.

The fact is that football is an extremely simple game when you have fourth-and-goal at the 1 with a 6-foot-2 Division I basketball player under center and an offensive line that is considered by every non-partisan observer in the game to be among the league's best in front of him.

Believe it or not, I don't actually have a Google alert set up for the words "true championship team", but I probably should. Either way, that sort of statement is just downright silly. From 1999 through 2007, the years in which Reid has been a head coach, runs on the one-yard line resulted in either a touchdown or a first down 55.9 percent of the time. There's not a single team since 1999 -- not even one -- that ran the ball from the 1-yard line ten or more times in a given season and converted 90 percent of the time. The closest team, in 2005, converted 10 out of 12 attempts for an 83.3 percent conversion percentage. That's also the franchise which, since Andy Reid became the Eagles' head coach in 1999, has had the highest percentage of successful rushing conversions from the 1.

It's the Atlanta Falcons.

The Falcons have converted 73.1 percent of their attempts from the 1 since 1999; in all fairness, the Patriots are second, having converted 72.6 percent of their attempts. The Eagles sit a lowly...fourth, at 68.3 percent.

Among the worst teams in the league include the Colts (42.9%), Giants (45.1%), and Ravens (50%); all have won championships in the past decade. Furthermore, if we just take the performance of the nine Super Bowl winners over the timeframe and analyze their performance from the 1 in the year(s) they won, those teams were 39-of-69, which calculates out to 56.5 percent, exactly 0.6 percent above the league average. In other words, suggesting that championship teams have a knack for punching it in inside the 1, or that Andy Reid is unable to do so, is a spurious claim at best.

As for the suggestion of using McNabb as opposed to Correll Buckhalter, well, let's check that. As mentioned earlier, the Eagles have a 68.3 percent conversion rate from the 1 since 1999; to be specific, they are 28-of-41. Over that timeframe, McNabb is 6-for-6. Without knowing how hurt McNabb was, using him in that role is ideal.

That extends to the quarterback sneak as a whole. Since 1995, quarterbacks have converted from the 1 an impressive 62 percent of the time; running backs, on the other hand, convert on only 39 percent of their attempts.

In all likelihood, the failure of the Eagles to convert from the 1-yard-line on Sunday wasn't Andy Reid's coaching or Donovan McNabb's "chest contusion"; it was the absence of Shawn Andrews and the presence of an excellent Bears run defense, even without Tommie Harris. Extrapolating it out as a justification that Reid will never lead his team to a championship isn't just unfair to any formation of a coherent argument that the Eagles might need a new coach; it's a flat-out falsehood.