Why Stat Based Contract Incentives are Dumb

Case 1: You are a running back on a team which is out of playoff contention. You get a $1.5 million dollar bonus if you reach 1500 yards on the year, which doubles your salary. You have 1488 yards with thirty seconds left in the game. You are down by two, with one time out left. The call is a power sweep on 3rd and 2. You get to the outside and have the first down, and have two decisions. You can step out of bounds, save your team's time out, and help your team win the game. Or you can say screw it, this game is meaningless, I very well could not get another carry the rest of the season, and cut it upfield and go for the money. What do you do?

Case 2: You are the coach of a playoff team whose last game, which is a Monday night game, is meaningless. You figure to play your starters for most of the first quarter and then sit them. Your superstar running back gets a $2 million dollar bonus if he leads the league in rushing. After the first two series your running back is 53 yards out of the league lead. Do you bench him with the rest of the starters? He needs 29 yards at halftime. 13 more yards at the end of the third. You are playing the Raiders, your most hated rival, and a team with nothing to lose, who is more than willing to do something dirty to end your running backs season. When do you take him out?

Case 3: You are a baseball manager in the final game of the season. This game could determine home field advantage depending on who you face in the playoffs. Your starter gets a $2 million bonus if he has 20 wins. He has 19. It is 10-3 at the start of the bottom of the fifth. Your starter gets two outs, but gives up five runs, and there are runners at the corners. He obviously can't get the win if you pull him, but he clearly doesn't have his stuff tonight.

The fact that you have to think about anything other than doing the best thing for your team is stupid. The fact that people can say that the Giants are purposely not giving Tiki Barber carries because they don't want to pay his bonus is stupid. If I was an executive I would not have stat based incentives, and if I was a player I would not take them. I would be fine with incentives based on All-Star, MVP, etc. because they are not concrete things. Basing them directly on stats makes people deal with personal issues that you shouldn't have to deal with when you are playing sports. All anyone should worry about is helping the team.

On a related note stats like Completion Percentage and QB Rating are dumb because it rewards QB's that take sacks instead of throwing it away. There have been QB's who would eat the ball instead of throwing it away, because it reflects more poorly on them to throw it away. This is also dumb, and there should be some new stat created, similar to QB Rating, where something like yards per completion and number of completions are more important than incompletions. There will be problems with any formula created, but penalizing incompletions so heavily, when they are rarely that bad, seems silly.