[Goose]

Not really trying to change anyone's mind, but I'd guess that about 70% of coaches would have gone for it on fourth down in both of these scenarios. Punting from your opponent's 40-ish often* leads to a touchback. If failing on fourth down results in +20 yards of field position for your opponent, that's rarely the thing that causes you to lose a game.

Maybe not directly and immediately. However, we do have some data to evaluate that effect. https://www.bcftoys.com/sfp/ shows the mean (expected value) points per drive (PPD) in college football by year. Using the data from 2022 the PPD for a drive starting from a touchback (20 yard line) is 1.8 pts. The expected value for a drive starting at your own 41 is 2.72. Thus the expected return for your opponent is 151% of what it would be if you punted into the end zone. If you have a good punter and punt team and can get the ball at say the 10 yardline, the benefit rises to 165%.  Another way to look at it is that the average team starting at the 20 yard line will score a TD about 25.7 % of the time, while the same team starting at their own 41 would score 38.9% of the time. I would say that is a "significant" difference not to be ignored. Granted the data is also somewhat noisy.  Obviously if you do convert the above values don't matter. Unfortunately Stanford did not convert most of the time and arguably the first failure did matter.

Personally, I'm not going to fault TT for going with "conventional" coach-think (for once).

I am willing to wager that TTs decisions are affected not at all by what other coaches think or do.

[Goose]

Not really trying to change anyone's mind, but I'd guess that about 70% of coaches would have gone for it on fourth down in both of these scenarios. Punting from your opponent's 40-ish often* leads to a touchback. If failing on fourth down results in +20 yards of field position for your opponent, that's rarely the thing that causes you to lose a game.

Maybe not directly and immediately. However, we do have some data to evaluate that effect. https://www.bcftoys.com/sfp/ shows the mean (expected value) points per drive (PPD) in college football by year. Using the data from 2022 the PPD for a drive starting from a touchback (20 yard line) is 1.8 pts. The expected value for a drive starting at your own 41 is 2.72. Thus the expected return for your opponent is 151% of what it would be if you punted into the end zone. If you have a good punter and punt team and can get the ball at say the 10 yardline, the benefit rises to 165%.  Another way to look at it is that the average team starting at the 20 yard line will score a TD about 25.7 % of the time, while the same team starting at their own 41 would score 38.9% of the time. I would say that is a "significant" difference not to be ignored. Granted the data is also somewhat noisy.  Obviously if you do convert the above values don't matter. Unfortunately Stanford did not convert most of the time and arguably the first failure did matter.

Personally, I'm not going to fault TT for going with "conventional" coach-think (for once).

I am willing to wager that TTs decisions are affected not at all by what other coaches think or do.