GO GO GO GO GO!!!!

We all love to chant "GO!" when it's 4th down, even if it doesn't make sense. It feels adventurous. It feels bold and aggressive. It's often stupid.

Chaz loooooved to go for it on 4th. In his last 4 seasons, Chaz and the Irish ranked 3rd, 1st, 4th and 64th in 4th Down Attempts. Big drop-off in that last year, but being in the Top 4 for 3 straight years is pretty telling. Against those many attempts, Charlie's teams were decent at converting outside of 2008. In 2006, the Irish converted almost 58% of their 4th down attempts, good for a ranking of 32. In 07-09, those numbers were 54% (44th), 37% (99th), and 56% (37th).

Brian Kelly's teams came in at 58th (CMU), 32nd (Cincy), 36th, and 92nd in attempts. While Weis averaged the 18th most attempts in the 06-09 period, Kelly averaged 55th. So, we're likely to see fewer 4th down attempts under Kelly than we saw with Chuck, despite the fact that Kelly runs an up-tempo, screw-time-of-possession offense. But, we won't see a super conservative punt-no-matter what approach either. We should expect, based on his history, to be about average, or maybe slightly higher than average in terms of going for it (GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!).

While he may go for it slightly less, Kelly has had the same success rate as Weis. Kelly's last 4 teams were successful in 47% (67th), 50% (57th), 43% (76th), and 69% (11th) of their attempts. Over the past 4 years Weis has averaged 53rd in success % Rank, while Kelly's average was 52.75. Weis achieved a 1st Down 51.25% of the time, and Kelly 52.25% - again a statistical tie.

Of course there are a million factors that could influence this data set - competition, SOS, field position, quality of defense, offensive talent, etc etc. But at the least we can expect to see fewer attempts, and probably a fairly similar success rate.

Personally, I would welcome the change. While I liked the attitude in general that Weis displayed - the aggression and desire to win - it often looked more like gambling, and given the ~50% success rate, it was pretty much like flipping a coin.

My hope is that Kelly retains his slightly-more-aggressive-than-average approach (which speaks to some semblance of scenario planning), and that his results in his final year at Cincy is more indicative of what he can achieve (69% success rate on 4th is amazing) at ND. That would be nice. Yes, very nice.