Is the sports community playing it safe?

If you help coach your child's sports team, you might want to consider what scholars at Duke, Harvard, Cornell and other top schools are saying about risk-taking on the playing field: there isn't enough of it. This is the fascinating, recent subject of many an academic paper--as well as heated economics, psychology and statistics classroom discussion.

A televised sporting event is of great value to these instructors because it offers a complex series of risk-assessment and decision-making processes that play out step-by-step for all to examine. A pause in a World Series videotape can open the door to a complex analysis of rational choice. Behavioral economics looks in part at why people act irrationally, i.e., why stock market bubbles occur or why your fear of a plane crash might make you drive hundreds of miles instead of flying.

Statisticians can find many examples in sports when the odds (and gains) are far greater in going for it on fourth-and-four or pitching to a home run hitter instead of walking him. An obvious but still sensible risk seems to cause coaches to focus too intensely on the worst case scenario.

In the football example, punting from mid-field and gaining 30 yards of field position is usually not as valuable as the chance to keep the drive going when field goal position is imminent. So the next time your daughter's basketball team is down by two in the final seconds, you might want to set her up for a three-pointer instead of two to tie.

(The New York Times, July 30, 2003)