In life, we are prone to remembering emotionally charged moments as more numerous than they are in reality. Nowhere is this more common than in the realm of sports fandom. Certain events – be they especially positive or negative, get us charged up and we focus more on them than we do the less eventful plays that make up most of any game.

For Charger fans, one such hot button topic is the level of aggression of our beloved coach, Mike McCoy. In those 4th down, short yardage situations, Charger fans will tell you he’s one of the least gutsy coaches in the NFL. But we must ask, is this actually the reality? I set out to find just that.

Before we find that answer, we must examine the methodology. Firstly, how are we defining aggressiveness? We will not be comparing coaches’ decisions to those mathematically recommended by the 4th Down Bot, as even coaches who adhere most strictly to the math would come out with a failing grade. I also won’t be examining cases of 4th & short in one’s own territory, as no coach actually is consistently aggressive here and traditionally the idea of aggressive 4th down decisions is in regards to opponent territory punt/FG/convert decisions.

The most straight forward method is to examine the decisions of NFL coaches and compare them to some expected decision for each play (and see which coaches perform above expectations most often). To determine what decisions should be expected from NFL coaches, I referenced the following chart (a smaller piece of the 4th Down Bot’s "What NFL Coaches Do Most Often" table)

As you can see, each square tells you the expected 4th down decision for the corresponding yard line & yards-to-go (YTG). For convenience, I have also added the distance of a field goal attempted at each yard line. (In situations where going for the 1st down is expected, it is only possible to meet/fail-to-meet expectations, as the act of "going for it" is how one performs above expectations). The yard range was chosen to represent one from slightly longer than the longest NFL FG up until a FG just longer than the new extra point (at the 15-yard line). The chart has a cut-off of 3YTG, because past that it is not reasonable to expect NFL coaches to "go for it" (G4I) at any yard line.

I chose to examine data from 3 years, 2013-2015 (regular & post-seasons), to maximize the sample size. Even with a 3-year sample, the total instances for each subject are minimal – but because this is as much a gauge for the entire NFL as it is an examination of McCoy, we can still learn something about how NFL head coaches think. Using these 3 years of data, I split the aforementioned yard line & YTG scenarios into 3 groups: