Last night offered a perfect illustration of one of the many reasons newspaper journalism is in trouble. In last night’s game between the Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots, the Patriots, up 6 points, went for it on fourth and 2 with 2:08 left in the game. They failed to make the first down, and Peyton Manning took the Colts in for the score, winning the game 35-34.
Let’s look at the analysis offered by a major metropolitan daily, the Houston Chronicle.
Here’s their NFL reporter, John McClain:
I still can’t believe what I just witnessed. Belichick is getting ripped because of his clock management and his unbelievable decision to go for a first down when he should have punted. They didn’t make it, and they gave Peyton Manning the ball at their 29 trailing by six.
And here’s Jerome Solomon:
There won’t be a much more exciting finish than this year’s Colts-Patriots. Of course, there won’t be a much more idiotic call than Bill Belichick electing to go for a fourth-and-2 from his own 28-yard line despite his team holding a six-point lead. There is no legitimate excuse for such a move. It wasn’t gutsy, and even if it had worked, it just wasn’t smart. Is the pressure of not winning a Super Bowl in five years starting to wear on the Hooded One?
So, according to them, Belichick is “idiotic” and his decision was “unbelievable,” but neither of those adjectives are accompanied by any analysis whatsoever. On the other hand, here’s some quick postgame analysis from a couple of blogs. First, Smart Football, which analyzed the decision without crunching the numbers:
The goal is, obviously, to maximize your chance of winning. If you punt, your chances of winning are your odds of stopping a streaking Manning who has just torched your defense the whole fourth quarter. He will have to drive about 70 yards. Because of his excellence in clock management, the two-minute warning, and their timeout, time was not really a factor. (The analysis would be much different if there was only, say, a minute left.)
If you go for it, your chance of winning hinges on two outcomes: (a) if you get the first down, you win the game; and (b) if you don’t get it, you still have a chance to stop Manning. So your chance of winning if you go for it is the sum of (a) your chance of converting; and (b) your chance of stopping Manning from the 30 yard line.
Here’s Advanced NFL Stats with the numbers:
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You’d have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats’ 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it’s pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.
Are we really going to miss those guys I quoted at the top?
How Priceline whores out your credit card
Today a Senate staff report prepared for Jay Rockefeller was released that details how “loyalty programs” harvest subscribers by purchasing ads on the “thank you” pages that are displayed after you complete a transaction with various online merchants, many of which you’ve heard of.
These Web loyalty programs, run by Affinion, Webloyalty, and Vertrue, have hauled in $1.4 billion in revenue and paid about $800 billion of that back out for ad placement. The Consumerist has a list of the 88 companies that have earned at least $1 million in this fashion.
Felix Salmon has more on the numbers and the ownership of the firms that are doing the scamming.
Xconomy has a page that illustrates changes Webloyalty made to comply with a settlement in a lawsuit filed against them. You can see how the scams work from the illustration. Basically, when you’re done with your transaction an add is displayed offering you a coupon or a special offer. I’ve seen them many times, but never clicked. When you agree to accept the special offer, you’re enrolled in a “loyalty program” that charges you a monthly fee after 30 days. Because of agreements the merchants have with these other companies, your credit card number is automatically given to the “loyalty” vendor. So people are accepting these offers without reading the fine print and subscribing to a service they don’t want or need. The next thing you now, weird charges are showing up on their credit card bills.
There are other scams, too. For example, Ben Stein makes ads for a “free” credit score reporting service that secretly signs you up for a $29.95 monthly subscription in exchange for accessing the free report. Felix Salmon has been all over this for a few months.
There are active comment threads about this at Hacker News and Metafilter.
Update: For a somewhat unfiltered look at what WebLoyalty promises, check out this page at the Americart site. Americart is a third party shopping cart provider, and one of the “benefits” they offer is free WebLoyalty integration. If you add it, they’ll give you $100 for every 1000 transactions they process, which isn’t a very good deal compared to what you’re getting. Your customers get a $10 discount coupon so long as they sign up for one of WebLoyalty’s insurance programs. I feel gross just having read about it.