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1. BEAT BILL BELICHICK
My advice to Pete Carroll
www.h2o.ai

2. TB + BB
Bill Belichick Tom Brady
+ =
15 years together
3 Super Bowls

3. PASS OR RUN?
On any given offensive play…
Coach Bill can either call a PASS or a RUN
What determines this?
Game situation
Opposing team
Time remaining, etc, etc
Yards to go (until 1st down)
Basically, lots of s*it.

4. BUT WHAT IF??
Question:
Can we try to predict whether the next play will be PASS or RUN
using historical data?
Approach:
Download every offensive play from Bilichick-Brady era since 2000
Use various Machine Learning approaches to model PASS / RUN
Disclaimer: I’m not a Seahawks fan!
Extract known features to build model inputs

5. DATA COLLECTION
Data:
13 years of data (2002 -2013 season)
194 games total
14,547 total offensive plays (excludes punts, kickoffs, returns)
Response Variable: PASS / RUN
Model Inputs:
Quarter, Minutes, Seconds, OpposingTeam, Down, Distance,
Line of Scrimmage, NE-Score, OpposingTeam Score, Season,
Formation, Game Status (is NE losing / winning / tied)

6. MODEL RESULTS
H20 Model Confusion Matrix Overall Accuracy
Random Forest
Gradient Boosting
(100Trees)
GLM
(100Trees)
74%
75%
72%

7. SO, COACH PETE CARROLL…
75% Accurate at predicting PASS / RUN*
*Assumes non-deflated footballs!
We’ll ‘play’ our model live on Super Bowl 32!