Ravens Rely on Gut Feeling Over Analytics

OWINGS MILLS, Md. — The Ravens use analytics more than many other NFL teams to assess certain situations.

However, coach John Harbaugh still uses old-fashioned gut feeling when it comes to making in-game decisions, much like going for critical 2-point conversions in each of the past three weeks.

The Ravens were not successful in any of those attempts and lost all of those games.

"We definitely don’t follow the model 100%, by any stretch of the imagination," Harbaugh said. "The model tells you to go for two, [and] it tells you to go for fourth downs a lot more than we do. In terms of those two situations, I’d say that’s probably the case. Now, what are some of the other analytics things? There’s a lot more to analytics than just those game-time decisions. We take all that information that you get through all the different outlets that you get information [from], and we try to build models and try to gather as much as we can, in terms of our game-planning, too. So, we really apply all that stuff.

"You apply that to your film study. So, you not just watching tape and making notes – which is a big part of it, because your eye tells you a lot – but we’re also filtering that through the lens of what we know based on qualitative information that comes through off of the film study and the Next Gen Stats and the tracking and all these different things that we’re able to assimilate and put into a body of information and then try to analyze it and make sense of it."

Harbaugh has said that "information is king" and the Ravens are going to try to find an edge any way they can.

However, it's unfair criticism they rely too heavily on analytics. The Ravens will continue to utilize a piece of potentially useful information, but they know wins and losses come down to old-school coaching and the players' performance.

"So, it’s a good process. It’s just information is way more advanced than it was," Harbaugh said. "There’s always been analytics in football – all the way back to my dad’s day, when they used to take the cards and put the spikes in them and shake them out, and the ones that fell out you knew weren’t third-down plays and all that. So, just a much more advanced version of what’s been going on for many years in football.”