Will teams learn a lesson from this Super Bowl and embrace analytics based decision making? Doug Pederson has been more aggressive than the average coach the entire season, when it came to decisions regarding 4th down. The reason behind this aggression is that the Eagles analytics team has shown that despite conventional wisdom, punting or taking a field goal often hurts a teams chances to win compared to attempting a 4th down play. We saw two cases of this in the Superbowl, the Nick Foles 4th Down TD, and the completion to Zach Ertz on the Eagles own 40 in the fourth quarter.

Innovation does not go unnoticed in the NFL. Look at the play Belicheck called to end the half. Instead of a traditional Hail Mary, he tried a screen play similar to the one Andy Reid ran for a TD early in the season. Should we expect coaches to adopt this style of decision making next season?