Read the following passage:
Timothy Treep, a former Royal Air Force Wing Commander, tracked play-by-play data for matches and served as a quantitative consultant for Football League teams as early as the 1950s. He took it upon himself to attend every Swindon Town F.C. match - sometimes with a miner's helmet on his head to better illuminate his notes - and meticulously scribble down play-by-play diagrams of how everything went down. More than 60 years before player-tracking cameras became all the rage in pro sports, Treep was mapping out primitive spatial data the old-fashioned way, by hand.
Poring over all the scraps of data he'd collected, Treep eventually came to a realization: Most goals in soccer come off of plays that were preceded by three passes or fewer. And in Treep's mind, this basic truth of the game should dictate how teams play. The key to winning more matches seemed to be as simple as cutting down on your passing and possession time, and getting the ball downfield as quickly as possible instead. The long ball was Treep's secret weapon.
"Not more than three passes," Treep admonished during a 1993 interview with the BBC. "If a team tries to play football and keeps it down to not more than three passes, it will have a much higher chance of winning matches. Passing for the sake of passing can be disastrous."
This was it: Maybe the first case in history of an actionable sports strategy derived from next-level data collection, such as it was. And Treep got more than a few important folks to listen to his ideas, too. It took him a few decades of preaching, but Treep's recommended playing style was adopted to instant success by Wimbledon F.C. in the 1980s, and then reached the highest echelons of English soccer - channeled as it was through the combination of England manager Graham Taylor and Football Association coaching director Charles Hughes, each of whom believed in hoofing the ball up the pitch and chasing it down (and now seemed to have the data to back up their intuition). The long ball was suddenly England's official footballing policy.
- In a short paragraph (100 words), explain to your statistics professor why Treep was using the wrong probability to assess the relative efficiency of different scoring strategies, and what probability would be more appropriate. (Note: Please ignore the issue of correlation vs. causation.)
- Write a short paragraph (100-200 words) to a soccer coach explaining your logic in (a). The letter should be written in language that the soccer coach (who is intelligent and educated, but not well-versed in statistics) can understand.