It is not news that we often act against our own interest. Human nature yanks us in so many ways as to make rational decision-making almost impossible. Parents give their teen-agers cars and cell phones. Much of the middle class votes Republican. And N.F.L. head coaches continue to punt the ball on fourth down.

Punting has been a part of football since the game’s earliest days, but it was long considered so unimportant that teams simply trained safeties or running backs to do the task. The professionalization of punting arrived in the seventies, when the Oakland Raiders selected Ray Guy, a punter, in the first round of the N.F.L. draft. (It’s fitting that Al Davis made this choice, the only such selection in draft history; he later took Sebastian Janikowski, a kicker, with the seventeenth overall pick.) Today, their presence is expected and well remunerated. Punters and kickers now make, on average, more than tight ends. Shane Lechler—again, of the Raiders—earns $3.8 million a year. Lechler punted seventy-eight times last year, meaning the Raiders shelled out nearly fifty thousand dollars for each time he stepped on the field.

Yet there is growing statistical evidence to suggest that paying punters at all is, at best, a misallocation of salary-capped funds and, at worst, counterproductive. The Times recently cited a paper by David Romer (PDF), a professor of political economy at the University of California at Berkeley, that has become “the gospel for the antipunting faction.” Romer’s determination, after studying punt data from 1998 to 2004, was that teams should never punt when facing fourth down with less than four yards to go for the first, regardless of where they are on the field. Other analysis has suggested that teams should never punt from inside their opponent’s forty-yard line. As a corollary, they should always go for a touchdown, rather than a field goal, from inside the five-yard line.

And yet football teams continue to do the opposite. Those attempting to put the data into action are stuck, for now, in the lower ranks of the game. The archetype for non-punting football has become a high-school team in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Pulaski Academy Bruins do not return punts (fumbles and penalties outweigh big returns, they say), they perform onside kicks after almost every score, and they never, ever punt. Last season, they went undefeated and won the state title. But coaches at higher levels have been slow to buy in to their system. San Diego State coach Rocky Long has said he might consider going for it on fourth down once his offense crosses midfield this season, but he’s an exception, and there are few others. Anyone that tries it puts himself at risk. In 2009, Bill Belichick opted not to punt on fourth down from his own twenty-eight-yard line, late in the game, with his team leading by six points. The statisticians came to Belichick’s defense when the play failed and the Patriots lost, but he was still roundly mocked, stats be damned. This is common. Once, when the Pulaski Bruins actually did punt, their own fans gave them a standing ovation.

Last week, Chris Kluwe, punter for the Minnesota Vikings and a regularly entertaining contributor to Deadspin, wrote a response to the announcement that San Diego State might no longer punt. (It begins “I am about to GO NUTS,” and in terms of decorum, goes downhill from there.) His argument cited statistics on the increasing likelihood that an opposing team will score when they receive the ball closer to the end zone, and the difference in level of play from high school to the N.F.L. But mostly he made the point that N.F.L. coaches, who are paid many millions of dollars, are scared gutless about losing their jobs. (“Do you know who likes keeping their jobs? NFL HEAD COACHES.”) Failing in the traditional punt-filled manner is more easily explained to fans, the thinking goes, than explaining that various statistical reports bear out a decision to go for it on fourth down.

But even this may be changing. Fans and other outsiders are almost always ahead of coaches and team executives when it comes to statistical revolutions in sports—the inventors of Moneyball were inspired by Bill James’s books—and it is now an article of faith among fans who populate the growing number of Web sites analyzing football in the same statistical way that punting on fourth down is often a bad idea. Crowds now regularly boo punts that occur in the opposing team’s territory as cowardly. Soon, they might boo punts from their own team’s end. When that happens, the coaches will be out of excuses.

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo.