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Aggressiveness Index 2019

John Harbaugh set an all-time record for fourth-down aggressiveness in 2019. If you've paid any attention to the NFL this year, this fact will not surprise you.

Football Outsiders introduced the concept of Aggressiveness Index way back in Pro Football Prospectus 2006. The goal was to find a way to rank coaches based on their tendencies on fourth downs in a manner that was easy to understand but accounted for the different rates at which the average coach will choose to "go for it" in different situations. Although no NFL coach is as aggressive as the data suggests he should be, we discovered there is quite a wide range of fourth-down tendencies among coaches.