1. Safety First

It was 4th down & 37 yards to go. On PASS Sports Detroit, play-by-play man Mark Crawford and color man Bill Brundell called the action. Brundell quipped, “That’s 4th & a new zip code, as they say...”

There were five and a half minutes left in the 1992 Michigan High School Class B State Championship game. The Marysville Vikings, coached by the legendary Walt Braun, were backed up to their own 11 yard line. The Vikings led the Kingsford Flivvers by a score of 21-10.

For those unfamiliar with American football, fourth down and long is the time most teams elect to punt . A punt is designed to improve the punting team’s field position. After a fourth down play, if the team on offense doesn’t make up the distance to the first down marker, they typically have to surrender the ball to the team playing defense, turning it over at the former line of scrimmage. Punting gives the receiving team a chance to return the ball. What can’t be returned pushes back the receiving team’s next offensive drive. Like most things, the decision whether to punt or not is one of tradeoffs.

Braun called a timeout. Just two years earlier, Walt Braun had suffered a major stroke, so he spoke quietly with measured syllables into the ear of Jim Venia, Defensive Coordinator and Athletic Director. Then Marysville sent it's offense, not it's punt team, back on the field. After the timeout, Crawford picked up the call, “Kingsford about to get the ball back. Marysville will punt... Oh my! They’re not showing punt! They’re up at the line of scrimmage on 4th & 37!”

Marysville Quarterback Ben Delor took the snap and sprinted through the back of Marysville’s own end zone for a safety, giving Kingsford two points.

Why would a team elect give their opponent two points?

All game long, both defenses put tremendous pressure on anyone trying to throw or kick. Getting a punt blocked in their own endzone would risk handing Kingsford a quick touchdown. Having taken the safety, the Vikings still had to kick the ball to Kingsford, but it gave Marysville the option of a “free kick": The Vikings could EITHER punt OR kickoff from the twenty yard line. By the time the teams had reset and Dennis Delor, starting fullback and Ben’s older brother, punted the free kick away, the ramifications of the Walt Braun’s decision began to come apparent to the partisans in the crowd:

Sometimes you can create value by taking something away.

The score was now 21-12 with not much time left. The difference of nine points is significant. A touchdown is worth six points. The point-after try is another option to kick the ball for one point, or take the option to pass or run it into the endzone from the three yard line for two points. A quick scenario analysis revealed if Kingsford scored a touchdown and, in the best case, if they made the conversion, Marysville would still lead by a single point ~(21-20). Taking the safety preserved the score differential just enough to keep it a two-possession game.

It was a masterful stroke of strategic decision making on Walt Braun’s part. It was crafty, sure, but it was also based on reasoning grounded in the firmament of game theory. Braun calculated that punting from his own end zone wasn't worth the risk of 6+ points from a potential blocked punt, but avoiding that risk was worth two throwaway points.

First Degree of Freedom is a series of self-reflective pieces about how economics has impacted my life. I don’t enjoy reading many first-person narratives, so I can understand if this might be perceived as self-centered. Ultimately, we write what we know. I know economics now, but I didn’t always. First Degree of Freedom is an attempt to show how all of us kind of knew economics all along. The keystone of economics, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, is human behavior (Behavioral Economics).

The title First Degree of Freedom is drawn from the field of statistics. Numerically it can be thought of as (n-1) where n is the sample size. But the implications of the first degree of freedom as important as the Mayan’s invention of the number ‘zero’:

With the first degree of freedom, at any decision point we retain the option to do nothing at all. 

Or, in the words of Rush drummer Neil Peart...