Mike Martz

Mike Martz, head coach of the St. Louis Rams, exemplifies the gap between professional convention and strategically better judgment. In Super Bowl XXXVI, he twice declined to pursue a first down on fourth down, choosing instead to send out the kicking team. The book places those calls against David Romer’s analysis of hundreds of NFL games: although no single decision can be blamed for the Rams’ loss, Romer’s results make Martz’s caution a revealing case of how imitation and social proof can persist even among experts whose success depends on winning.

Identity and Setting

Martz appears here not through a personal history or a broad account of his coaching career, but in a sharply defined professional role: he is the head coach of the St. Louis Rams and the decision-maker at two consequential fourth downs. The narrative introduces him within the expectations surrounding a heavily favored team. Before Super Bowl XXXVI, the Rams were favored by fourteen points, had led the league in eighteen statistical categories, and had outscored opponents 503 to 273 during the regular season. In that setting, the game initially seemed to offer little reason to expect a contest between the Rams’ strength and their coach’s judgment.

That confident pregame picture makes the choices that follow more striking. The issue is not that Martz lacked a powerful offense or that the Rams entered as underdogs forced into desperate gambles. Rather, the team’s apparent superiority sharpens the question of why its coach would repeatedly accept a limited, conventional option instead of the potential advantage of continuing an offensive drive.

The Two Fourth-Down Decisions

Midway through the first quarter, the Rams made their first major drive of the game, advancing from their own twenty-yard line to the Patriots’ thirty-two. On fourth down, they needed three yards for a first down. Martz sent in kicker Jeff Wilkins rather than keeping the offense on the field. Wilkins made the field goal, giving St. Louis a 3–0 lead. The decision delivered points, but it also ended a drive that had reached a position from which the Rams could attempt to retain possession.

Six minutes later, a Rams drive stalled at the Patriots’ thirty-four-yard line. This time, St. Louis needed five yards for a first down. Martz again chose the kicking team. Wilkins’s attempt went wide left, and the Rams came away with no points. The contrast between the calls’ immediate results is plain: the first produced three points, while the second produced none. In both cases, however, the underlying choice was the same—prefer the familiar field-goal attempt to the uncertain chance of extending the drive.

By the usual standards of the NFL, Martz’s choices were not eccentric. Coaches generally favored taking a potential field goal over going for a first down, guided by the conventional maxim that a team should take points when it can. That context matters: the book does not describe Martz as inventing an unusual tactic or acting outside professional norms. It shows him applying the norms as they stood—and then tests those norms against a systematic analysis of what the alternatives were worth.

Romer’s Analysis and Its Implications

Economist David Romer examined fourth-down strategy using dynamic programming and data from roughly seven hundred games in the 1998, 1999, and 2000 NFL seasons. His analysis estimated the value of a first down at different points on the field and compared the expected benefits of attempting to continue a drive with those of kicking or punting. The resulting framework made it possible to assess decisions such as Martz’s not merely by whether a kick happened to succeed, but by the expected value of each available choice.

Romer’s examples show why the apparently cautious option can be strategically inferior. On fourth down at an opponent’s two-yard line, a field goal offers three points, while a touchdown attempt that succeeds 43 percent of the time has an expected scoring value of roughly the same amount. But a failed attempt would leave the opponent pinned on its own two-yard line, improving the field-position consequences of going for the touchdown. At midfield, a fourth-and-three attempt that succeeds half the time can likewise be preferable: success yields an average gain of six yards, while failure does not necessarily leave the opposing team with an equivalent advantage in field position.

The analysis had limits. Romer could not fully account for factors such as momentum, and his estimates averaged performance across the league rather than reflecting each team’s particular strengths. Yet those qualifications do not rescue the general coaching convention in the book’s account. Even allowing for adjustments by team, Romer’s calculations suggest that coaches were excessively cautious. At the Patriots’ thirty-two, Martz’s decision to kick instead of attempting a first down was questionable even if the Rams had needed nine yards, because the chance of missing a field goal was high and the field-position cost of failure was relatively slight. With an offense as potent as the Rams’, the expected value of going for it would presumably have been higher still.

The book stops short of attributing the final outcome to Martz’s two calls: it is impossible to establish that either, or both, caused the Rams to lose. But the analysis makes their significance more than retrospective criticism. Romer found 1,100 first-quarter fourth-down situations in the three seasons studied in which teams would have been better off going for it; instead, teams kicked the ball 992 times. Martz’s decisions therefore belong to a recurring pattern, not an isolated miscalculation.

Convention, Imitation, and Social Proof

The puzzle is that professional coaches are trying to win, are experts in their field, and have incentives to find competitive advantages—yet they often do not use a strategy that the analysis suggests could help them win. The book acknowledges that football is complex and that Romer’s computer program might have missed something important. It nevertheless argues that the prospective gains from greater aggressiveness were too large to dismiss as a statistical fluke or artifact. A coach who adopted a more aggressive fourth-down strategy could gain an edge, while most coaches continued to choose caution.

Martz’s role in the argument is thus less that of a uniquely poor decision-maker than that of an expert acting in step with his peers. In the absence of hard evidence against a deeply established practice, it is easier to explain why the accepted approach is right than to imagine how the game might be played differently. When the other coaches decline to go for it, their collective behavior itself seems to validate the decision. That is social proof: the inference that if many people behave in a particular way, there must be a good reason. The same mechanism can make following the group sensible when the group is usually well informed, but if too many people rely on that strategy, the group can become less intelligent rather than more so.

Martz’s two calls give this argument a concrete sequence: a favored team reaches fourth down, the coach opts for the conventional kick, and the familiar choice appears professionally reasonable even where another strategy may have offered greater expected value. The first kick’s success can make caution look validated; the second kick’s failure exposes the risk without, by itself, proving that the alternative would have worked. The deeper criticism rests not on hindsight about one game, but on Romer’s broader comparison of possible strategies with repeated league practice. Martz’s Super Bowl decisions matter because they make visible how a group’s accumulated habits can pass for wisdom—and how that appearance can keep better-supported alternatives off the field.