Why are so many NFL and top college coaches so horrible and down/distance/time management?

This isn’t one of the most pressing public issues of the moment, but it’s one that I find fascinating. NFL and big time college football coaches are at the top of their profession, and are paid millions of dollars per year to do their jobs. You would think that decisions such as whether to punt or not would have been routinized by them to the point where they wouldn’t make absurdly obvious mistakes in this regard (although of course there would still be difficult decisions at the margin).

Here’s a classic example from this past weekend:

Tampa Bay is trailing 27-7. They have a fourth and six at the Denver 46 yard line, with 7:30 remaining in the game. To this point, Denver has possessed the ball for 16:10 out of the 22:30 of second half game time. Tampa Bay needs at least three TDs to have a chance to win. Dirk Koetter decides to punt.

Now here are a couple of common rationalizations that get made for this kind of thing:

(1) Koetter knows his team has almost no chance so he’s just trying to get out of Dodge without more injuries.

Now this might be a defensible decision (Tampa Bay’s chances of winning are very slim at this point even if he doesn’t do stupid stuff like punt in this situation), except he’s not making that decision, because when Tampa Bay did the ball back, in an even more hopeless situation at their own 19 with four minutes left, he sent Jameis Winston out there again to get chewed up by the Denver pass rush.

(2) Since they have almost no chance anyway what difference does it make?

Well the difference it makes is that you’re moving your chances of winning from 4% to 1% (or whatever), which is actually a huge difference in percentage terms, if not absolute terms. It’s like saying that it doesn’t matter if you make a horrible bet on a hand in poker in which you’re way behind, because you’re likely to lose anyway. What sort of sense does that make?

. . . a couple of other common ones mentioned in comments:

(3) Coaches don’t just try to avoid losing, they try to avoid losing while making unconventional decisions, since they will be blamed for both the loss and the unconventional decision making. This argument has a lot of force I think, but the interesting thing here is that the conventional wisdom about when to punt has shifted markedly over the past decade or so, and coaches like Koetter and many others are still way behind it.

(4) Coaches will sometimes try to maximize the odds of avoiding a blowout over the odds of actually winning, when the latter are very small. I dunno . . . maybe. But does anybody really care whether you lose by three TDs or four (or five?). Also, it’s unclear whether people are defending this purported strategy or just describing it.

Anyway, what explains the commonplace use of massively suboptimal strategies in regard to down and distance decisions by people at the top of their profession? I’m sure there are a lot of factors, but it’s very strange in an era where it’s extremely easy to demonstrate that many of these decisions make no sense.