Going for two each time Theory

[sam h]

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I'm assuming most people here read David Sklansky's article a few months back about going for it on 4th down. The basis of his whole article was that you can calculate your EP(expected points) from any field position, your opponents EP from that same spot in case you fail, and your expected 4th down conversion success rate, and then compute your best play from that. He of course offered the caveat that it doesn't apply in certain situations where you'd want to minimize your variance, but in general it is correct. Now i'm not saying this method of analyzing football decisions is correct just because he says it is, but I do think that carries a lot of weight.

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Did David pass this off as his own idea? Because a statistics professor at Berkeley wrote a paper a few years back that got a fair amount of press which basically argued the same thing and found that teams should go for it around midfield in 4th and short situations almost every time.