On Saturday, I was the sideline reporter for the UW–Platteville Homecoming football game. Final score: UWP 49, UW–Eau Claire 27.

Three weeks ago, I announced Platteville High School’s 56–13 win over Richland Center. The Hillmen scored, believe it or not, the fewest points of the three winning teams in their conference that week.

I have also called a 48–45 Platteville loss and, two weeks ago, a 50–7 win, the same night as this epic: Oconomowoc 84, Wisconsin Lutheran 82. (No, that was not a basketball game. In fact, I predict that that football game will have more points than any high school basketball game in Wisconsin this year.)

Last season, Wisconsin locked up its third consecutive Rose Bowl trip by beating Nebraska in the Big Ten championship, 70–31. That came a year after Wisconsin beat Michigan State, 42–39 to win the first Big Ten title game. One season before that, the Badgers broke their single-game scoring record — which was set in 1962 — three times, with wins of 70–3, 83–20 and 70–23.

The Packers went 15–1 in the 2011 season despite the fact that they ranked 19th in the NFL in scoring defense and dead last in yardage given up. They were number one because they had the number one scoring offense in the NFL.

It seems a gross understatement to say that in football, the offense is ahead of the defense. That seems to be the case in every level of football, not just the pros.

One of my favorite football commentators, ESPN.com’s Gregg Easterbrook, has noticed:

Denver and Dallas played a contest with 99 points, 1,039 yards of offense and one punt. At 46 points per game, the Broncos are on a pace to score 736 points, which would pulverize the NFL season record of 589 points. At 490 offensive yards per game, they’re on pace to gain 7,840 yards, which would best the league record of 7,474.

And the Broncos are staring at the taillights of the Oregon Ducks and Baylor Bears! Baylor is averaging 71 points and 790 offensive yards per game; Oregon, 59 points and 630 yards. Saturday, Baylor gained 617 yards in the first half.

The offense surge is remarkable across football. A decade ago, the hot quarterback was the same — Peyton Manning — but no NFL team averaged more than 400 yards on offense. Today, Philadelphia’s 453-yard average is practically ho-hum. NFL average scoring per team per game has risen from 18.7 points two decades ago to 22.8 points in 2012 to 23.1 so far this season. The NFL scoring record came in 2007 (New England), the yardage record in 2011 (New Orleans). The NFL’s three best performances ever for first downs were in 2012 (New England), 2011 (New Orleans) and 2011 (New England). How many records will fall in 2013?

And the NFL is staring at the taillights of the NCAA! FBS scoring has risen from 20.6 points per game per team in 1972 to 28.3 points in 2012 to 30.4 points so far this season. The 122 schools of the FBS are averaging — averaging — 420 offensive yards gained. So far 19 big-time colleges average at least 500 yards per game. Roll in the FCS, Division II and Division III: All told, 69 colleges and universities are gaining more yards than the Denver Broncos. Even the small schools are making the scoreboard spin. Johns Hopkins, an elite academic college, is averaging 544 yards gained.

Broadly across football, rule changes that favor offense — tighter pass-interference regulations especially — are having the intended impact of increasing scoring. Coaches are putting their best athletes on offense, further shifting the balance. The 7-on-7 fad that began in the high school ranks around the year 2000 has led to college and pro players who spent endless hours in youth practicing passing the ball, and the way you get to Carnegie Hall is to practice, practice, practice. (Or to go on strike.) New emphasis on flagging helmet-to-helmet hits has made defenders a tad less aggressive, which benefits offense. …

But gaudy numbers have become the new normal in college play. College offensive lines have switched to wider spacing, which spreads out the spread and generates yards. NFL teams could spread their lines too, but this would expose the quarterback to more hits, and protection of the $50 million quarterback is essential in the long professional season.

The NCAA’s first-down rule — clock stops on each first down — is snaps-friendly. So is the NCAA preference for running the ball. This weekend, Baylor rushed 65 percent of the time, while Denver passes 60 percent of the time. In a quick-snap offense, running allows a faster pace: The line can reform more rapidly, the wide receivers don’t have to walk back a long distance. Max Olson notes that quick-snap rushing has allowed Baylor to score in two minutes or less 29 times in just four games. NCAA first-down rules and college rushing preference add up to more snaps, which increases yards. In the Baylor-West Virginia game, there were 170 offensive snaps; in the Denver-Dallas game, 127 snaps.

Ultimately, more snaps may account for the big offensive differentials in the NCAA versus the NFL. Dallas and Denver combined to average 8.2 yards per snap; Baylor and West Virginia, 7.4 yards per snap. But Baylor snapped 95 times versus 73 times for Denver. The pace of the Baylor-West Virginia game was dizzying — the official who spotted the ball had to sprint out of the way because he knew the snap was coming so fast. More snaps soften the defense. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been on the field, but playing defense is more tiring than playing offense. At Colorado, the Oregon Ducks snapped the ball 30 times in the first quarter. Defenders were gasping for air, and were only halfway to halftime.

The NFL is understandable. Since the late 1970s the league has sought to increase scoring, by changing rules in favor of the offense — limiting allowable contact between defensive backs and receivers and liberalizing what offensive linemen can do to hold off defensive linemen. Rules and fines aim to keep the game’s most marquee players, quarterbacks, from being injured. The NFL concluded years ago that fans like more points than fewer points. (The NFL concluded before that that fans like to think at the start of a season their team has a chance to win the Super Bowl, and so the NFL has worked to make building a dynasty more difficult.)

The college explanation for offense’s current triumph over defense has more dimensions. NFL trends inevitably flow down to colleges, but colleges also have been responsible for NFL innovations.

First, some offensive history: Nearly every football offense is based on what was first called the T formation, created by the Chicago Bears in 1940. The T has a quarterback, fullback behind the quarterback, two halfbacks on either side of the fullback, and two ends outside the tackles. Several years later, the Los Angeles Rams moved the right halfback farther to the right, outside the right-side end, and the “flanker,” or “Z” receiver, was born. Teams then took one of the ends and separated him from the rest of the line, creating the “split end,” or “X” receiver. (The tight end, on the opposite side as the split end, because the “Y” receiver.)

So the basic football formation was two running backs, two ends, and either a third running back or third receiver. (A “wingback” is a running back who plays outside the tight end but just one position over, instead of several yards outside the tight end.) Running backs ran the ball, and receivers caught the ball. Then the American Football League, which figured out before the NFL that the key to drawing non-diehards to be fans was to score a lot, threw the ball lot, even to running backs. Sometimes one of the running backs was moved out of the backfield, either next to another receiver or in motion. (Flankers also went in motion to mess up the defense, whose alignment was based on where the offensive players were when they lined up.)

Two offensive changes took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Bill Walsh created what became known as the West Coast offense (once he got to San Francisco), in which all five offensive non-linemen could catch the ball, and instead of hurling the ball down the field, short passes were used to move the ball while keeping possession of the ball.

Not long after that, two coaches separately decided to throw the ball on nearly every down, more out of necessity than anything else. If you’re going to do that, why do you need more than one running back? Thus was born the run-and-shoot, an offense that uses four wide receivers and just one running back.

Other coaches passed, so to speak, on the run-and-shoot, but decided to adopt one of its attributes — spreading out the offense horizontally (from sideline to sideline), which requires the defense to spread horizontally, which opens up the field for the offense. (Including, it was discovered a few years later, for running the football.)

That may be more offensive strategy than you cared to read. A more simple explanation for the growth of scoring is better players on offense. Today’s players are unquestionably bigger and stronger, and yet faster and quicker than players of the previous generation. The old adage “offense wins games, defense wins championships” meant college coaches tended to put their best athletes on defense, under the theory that holding your opponent to fewer points is easier than scoring more points. The related adage that three things happen when you throw the football and two of them are bad either led to, or was an example of, the ground-bound offenses, and thus low-scoring games of, well, decades.

In the 1970s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association restricted football teams to, eventually, 85 scholarship players. So if you were a good high school football player and wanted to play in college, you had to consider schools other than, say, Michigan, Ohio State, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama and so on. That spread out the available talent.

Football is not exactly a progressive sport, or at least it wasn’t. However, a few coaches who worked at then-unknown schools figured out that they weren’t likely to be able to recruit, say, Alabama’s players, but they could recruit players to do things Alabama and the other football powers weren’t doing. When Brigham Young University hired one of their assistants, LaVell Edwards, as head coach in 1972, Edwards started throwing the ball because the best previous season BYU had had was with a passing-oriented offense. Between 1972 and 2000, BYU had one losing season. Penn State recruited a kid from western Pennsylvania, Jim Kelly, to play linebacker. But Kelly wanted to play quarterback. Howard Schnellenberger, the coach at the University of Miami, thought Kelly would make a fine college quarterback. Kelly’s replacement at quarterback, Bernie Kosar, led the Hurricanes to a national championship.

The almighty dollar intervened elsewhere. If you are the athletic director of a college with a losing football program, a program that looks as if it will take several years to build, how can you get fans through the turnstiles? Entertain them. Mike White was hired as coach at Illinois. One of his first quarterbacks, Dave Wilson, threw for more than 600 yards in a game. People started to show up in Champaign. Fans want to win first, but if their team is going to lose, fans prefer to be entertained than bored. Similar to diehard baseball fans being entertained by a pitcher’s duel, only diehard football fans are entertained by, to quote NFL Films narrator John Facenda, a grim defensive struggle.

I haven’t studied it, but I predict that coaches with offensive backgrounds are hired more often as college head coaches than coaches with defensive backgrounds. (But that can be misleading; the three NFL coaches who ran the run-and-shoot were Jack Pardee, Jerry Glanville and Wayne Fontes. All were defensive coaches who adopted the run-and-shoot because they didn’t think defenses could stop it.)

As Easterbrook noted, college football rules haven’t kept up with the explosion in offense, which  is why college games can take longer than NFL games. (The 1984 Boston College–Miami game, featuring quarterbacks Doug Flutie and Kosar, took 4½ hours to play, and there was no overtime.) In high school and college, every first down stops the clock long enough to move the chains. (The aforementioned Dodgeville–Platteville game, with a 45-minute halftime lightning, took nearly four hours to play, with 12-minute quarters.) The clock stops on incompletions and plays out of bounds; the clock stops on out-of-bounds plays in the NFL only in the last two minutes of a half.

The study of leadership is really a study of decision-making, both in macro and micro terms.

In pro and college football, a “macro” decision is hiring the head coach, whether that’s done by a team owner or general manager, or by a college athletic director. A “micro” decision is field goal vs. going for the first down vs. punting. Make the wrong micro decisions too often, and you might find yourself the target of a macro decision you won’t like.

Grantland’s Bill Barnwell looked at five game decisions before the season began, because …

It’s difficult to think out of the box in the middle of a game, which is why the time to really think about these somewhat-aggressive concepts is actually now, before the season even begins. …

The Fourth-and-Goal Decision

Despite coaches having access to more information than ever before (including teams with full-time analytics departments), they’re also getting more and more conservative near the goal line. Last year, when teams faced a fourth down with goal-to-go inside the opposition’s 2-yard line, they kicked a field goal 59.3 percent of the time. In 2011, they were all the way up at 61.7 percent, a higher frequency than had been seen since 2000. Teams are supposed to be getting smarter, but somehow, they’re giving away points just when they need them most.

This is a really simple decision to understand. When teams kick a field goal, and they’ll hit just about 100 percent of the time here, they get three points. When they score a touchdown, they get seven points, including the extra point. Simple math tells us that if a team can convert on a fourth-down attempt 43 percent of the time, it is better off going for it than kicking a field goal.² Since 1999, teams that have gone for it in this very situation have succeeded and scored a touchdown 50.7 percent of the time. That suggests you’ll score an average of 3.0 points by choosing to kick a field goal and 3.55 points every time you choose to go for it, meaning you leave more than a half-point on the field every time you kick in that situation.

But wait, there’s more! There’s a hidden benefit of going for it deep in the opposition’s territory: When you try to score, even if you fail, you retain excellent field position against an opposing team trapped near its own end zone. If you kick a field goal, you kick off to the other team, and the average kickoff with the new rules has resulted in a return to the 24-yard line. Assuming that your failed fourth-down attempt turns the ball over on the 2-yard line, you’re giving up an average of 22 yards in field position by taking the easy three as opposed to trying for the touchdown. The difference in expected points scored by a team when it takes over on the 2-yard line as opposed to the 24-yard line is another 0.61 points. Add that to our figure from earlier and you’re now throwing away 1.16 points every time you kick inside the 2-yard line.

It doesn’t sound like a lot, but those points can be valuable, even if you don’t succeed by going for it. In two recent Super Bowls, teams have failed on a fourth-down try deep in opposition territory late in the second quarter, only to come back and score on a quick drive shortly thereafter. The Saints did it in their win over the Colts by going for it on fourth-and-goal and failing, forcing a quick punt from a pressed-against-his–goal line Peyton Manning, and then kicking a field goal just before halftime. Last year, the Ravens went for a fake field goal on fourth down inside the red zone with 3:12 to go, and while they came up a yard short, they pushed the 49ers onto the 6-yard line and got a quick three-and-out of their own, getting them the ball back on their own 44-yard line with 2:07 to go. Three plays later, Jacoby Jones was in the end zone. …

Readers of ESPN.com’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback are familiar with the Coach Who Never Punts. I announced (from the sideline) the UW–Eau Claire/UW–Platteville game Saturday, a game in which Eau Claire’s strategy was to use its ground-bound offense (with a Ron Dayne-size running back who averaged 5 yards per carry) to play keep-away from the high-flying Pioneer offense. Eau Claire’s first series featured a fourth-and-1 around midfield. Eau Claire punted instead of going for the first down, with a chance to grind at the Platteville defense. I thought at the time that was a bad decision, and, though Eau Claire led 20–14 at the half, Platteville, despite being very generous with the ball (missed 21-yard field goal, fumbled punt, kickoff return given up, red-zone fumble), still won 49–27.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but if Eau Claire had gotten one yard and the first down, the Blugolds could have scored while keeping the ball away from Platteville. The Pioneers drove the ball down the field to score after Eau Claire decided to punt instead of going for it. Maybe Eau Claire would still have lost, but if your game plan is to keep the ball away from the other team’s offense, punting is not how to do that.

Timeouts Near the Two-Minute Warning

This one is way less theoretical and works best with a real-life example from last season. During Denver’s Week 2 loss to Atlanta, John Fox mismanaged the clock in a way that cost his team a few precious seconds. The Falcons had just picked up an enormous first down with 2:30 left in the game, up by six points, leaving the Broncos with one timeout and the two-minute warning to try to stop the clock. At that point, Fox’s only hope is to stop the Falcons on three plays and get the ball back with as much time as possible for Manning to make magic happen. His chances aren’t good, but as Broncos fans cruelly remember, anything can happen at the end of an NFL game.

Fox chose to let the clock run down to the two-minute warning and let the Falcons run a play before using his final timeout. Now, it seems fair to assume the Falcons will run the ball on each of the three downs, with each run play (and the fourth-down punt) taking five seconds from snap to whistle. If Fox doesn’t call a timeout, the Falcons will burn 39 seconds off the clock between each play. …

By calling his timeout immediately, Fox saves his team five seconds. That comes from the first-down play. When Fox calls his timeout before the two-minute warning, that play occurs during time Fox is otherwise giving away. If he uses it after the two-minute warning, it’s coming during time Fox is trying to save.

And, again, sure, five seconds doesn’t mean a whole lot. But who knows when five seconds is going to be the difference between, say, a lob into the end zone from 40 yards out and an actual diagrammed play from 20 yards away? Or when it will give a team sprinting up to the 5-yard line for a spike the chance to get one extra play off? Coaches devour film hoping to find some tiny advantage that will give their team a chance to win on Sunday. This is nothing different. …

Don’t Put Your Two-Point Conversions in a Corner

Coaches go for the two-point conversion so infrequently that they really don’t ever think about it. They have a chart that tells them when to go for two, but they come up with arbitrary rules that don’t actually fit any scenario. Some coaches don’t go for two until the fourth quarter. Others wait even deeper; Mike Smith of the Falcons said last year that he doesn’t look at the two-point conversion chart until there are seven minutes left in the game, an arbitrary rule that nearly cost his team its playoff game against the Seahawks.

In that game, the Falcons were coasting, having just scored a third-quarter touchdown to go up 26-7, pending the extra-point try. Since the game had 17 minutes to go, Smith didn’t even think to go for two, lining up to kick an extra point. The Seahawks then went offside on two consecutive plays, moving the ball from the 2-yard line (where teams scored on 38.4 percent of their plays on any down last year) to the 1-yard line (at 56.2 percent now) and then, incredibly, to the half-yard line (the calculator just exploded). Even though Matt Ryan could have taken the snap and just shoved the ball forward with his hands to break the plane from 1.5 feet away, Smith still kicked an extra point to go up 27-7.

The benefits of a 20-point lead are murky: You’re still tied if the opposing team kicks two field goals and two touchdowns, I guess. A 21-point lead is much more tangible, and as it turned out, much more relevant, because the Seahawks proceeded to score three touchdowns and kick extra points during the next 16 minutes, which gave them a 28-27 lead with 34 seconds left, as opposed to the 28-28 tie that would almost surely have arisen if the Falcons had attempted a two-point conversion in that situation. The Falcons were able to piece together a quick drive and kick a game-winning field goal in that brief time, but if Matt Bryant misses his field goal with 13 seconds left, Smith’s simple decision to avoid his two-point chart until reaching an arbitrary game time would have cost his team its playoff life.

There’s a model that does a very good job of calculating the odds of when a team should go for two: The footballcommentary.com model uses history to chart the value of a given lead with a certain amount of time left and then creates breakeven expectations for when it’s better to go for two as opposed to kicking an extra point. In this case, Smith should have gone for two up 26-7 with 17 minutes left if he thought his team had a 34 percent chance of succeeding on the play. Atlanta had the league’s worst running game in “power” situations last year, but even it succeeded 39 percent of the time; it was a strong call from two yards out, and it was a gimme from a half-yard away.

Coaches shouldn’t have to look at a two-point chart for every touchdown, but there are a number of situations when it’s obvious to go for two at just about any point during the second half, some more so than others. Going for two when you’re down two points seems pretty clear. It’s also logical if you’re down 10 pending the extra point, since a two-pointer would make the game a possible one-possession contest, while an extra point would only really help by turning a tie into a win if you kick a field goal and score a touchdown (without having to attempt a two-pointer).

In all, the footballcommentary.com chart yields 11 score situations where a two-pointer is the right choice. They fit into a few simple categories. There’s the two-pointer to tie it up, for when you’re down two points after a touchdown. There’s the two-pointer that makes the opposing team score an additional touchdown to tie, which comes with leads of 5, 12, 19, and 26 points. There’s the two for a three-point margin, which comes up with a one-point lead and a five-point deficit, bringing you three points away from the other team in a situation when the alternative extra point is of little value. Then, there’s the two-pointer to eliminate a possession, which comes up when your team is trailing by 10, 13, and 18 points, which does exactly what it says it does: If you convert the two-pointer, you’ll need one fewer possession to tie. Finally, there’s the get to the two-pointer, which is when you’re down 16 and need to go for two on one of your three touchdowns. Remember those five basic rules and you won’t even need a chart. …

Don’t Get “Field Goal Range” Twisted

It’s amazing to see what head coaches do once they enter the magical realm of their kicker’s “field goal range.” Even if they moved the ball steadily up the field with a number of easy passes to open receivers against a tired defense, they take the ball out of their quarterback’s hands and hand it to their running back, whom they instruct to keep the ball safe at all costs. They run the ball into the line three times, don’t gain more than a yard or two of field position, and force their kicker to kick from the spot where they entered his “range,” even if that’s a disadvantageous kick. It’s like Jesse Camp winning the MTV veejay job and turning into Kurt Loder the second he walked through the doors on his first day. Well, it’s not like that, but you get the idea. Jason Garrett does this a lot, which is why he might be more likely to be an MTV veejay than Cowboys head coach in a year.

The problem is that kickers don’t have a steady rate of success³ from every single spot within that range. Jeff Fisher fell in love with Greg Zuerlein’s big leg last season, but he took a few early-season hits from 50-plus yards and seemed to infer that Zuerlein was just as good from 55 as he was from 35. This simply is not the case. …

If a team gets the ball into the edge of what would be considered the range for any healthy NFL kicker — 48 yards — it can run the ball into the line three times for no gain, run clock, and expect to get a successful field goal about 67 percent of the time. If it can get just one more first down and turn it into a 38-yard attempt, its success rate rises all the way to 82 percent. That’s a pretty notable swing.

There’s also the possibility that you could accidentally stumble upon a win, too. Remember that crazy 49ers-Saints game from the playoffs a couple years back? The 49ers were down three points with 40 seconds left and completed a pass to Vernon Davis for 47 yards, giving them the ball on New Orleans’s 20-yard line. This was back when David Akers was great and Alex Smith was under center, so about 80 percent of the league’s coaches would have settled for a pretty easy field goal attempt and pushed the game into overtime. As an underdog, Jim Harbaugh knew he probably couldn’t trade punches with the Saints in a situation where a bad coin flip could have allowed the Saints to score a game-winning touchdown on the first series of overtime. So, he drove forward: Smith completed a pass for six yards on first down, spiked the ball on second down, and then threw a fateful touchdown pass to Davis on third down for the game-winning score. By being aggressive, Harbaugh won a game as opposed to simply extending it into overtime. …

Don’t Ice the Freaking Kicker

Don’t do it. The numbers say it doesn’t work. Coaches do it because it’s a free opportunity to influence a game: If they ice a made kick and then get a miss, they’re hailed as geniuses for forcing a re-kick. If the opposite happens and they ice a missed kick before allowing a make to go through on the second try, we talk about the game-winning kicker, not the stupid coach. This is another case when correlation (the “icing”) has nothing to do with causation (the kicker making or missing a kick). Just save the timeout. Even if you’re not going to use it, just donate it to charity after regulation is over.

I have seen this work, though with a devilish twist. Ripon led Lodi 28–26 in the final seconds of a 2006 playoff game. Lodi’s kicker had already kicked two field goals, so the Blue Devils got to field goal range and ran down the clock for what they hoped would be the game-winning field goal. Ripon had all three time outs remaining, so the Tigers called … two. Whether someone in the long snapper/holder/kicker triumvirate was waiting for the third time out that was never called, the field goal attempt was blocked, and Ripon pulled off the biggest upset of the night in the state, given that Lodi was undefeated and number-one-seeded.

Though there were some highlights in the next week and a half …

… it didn’t end well …

… though losing the World Series is better than not getting there.