On the first possession of overtime on Sunday, Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Quinn decided to go for it on fourth-and-1 from Atlanta’s own 45-yard line, an unconventional strategy to say the least. It may have backfired with the San Diego Chargers defeating Atlanta 33-30, but as a calculated risk the decision itself is defensible.

In that situation, the ESPN Win Probability model (which accounts for things such as score, time, down, distance, yard line and even OT situation) gave Atlanta a 49.2 percent win probability for going for it. Punting the ball would have given them a 50.3 percent win probability, a slightly higher chance of winning.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a black-and-white bad decision, because those numbers assume a league average chance of converting the first down. A better way to approach it is to figure out what the chance of success would need to be to make the risk worthwhile and then decide if the Falcons had a better or worse chance than that baseline. In this case, Atlanta would have needed a 68 percent baseline chance of success, while the league average in that region of the field is 65 percent. That’s not far apart, and the Falcons have a much better than average offense.

Further, Quinn may have wisely wanted to take his chances with the strength of his team versus the weakness of his opponent, rather than try to stop a Philip Rivers-led offense that had just come back from a 17-point deficit on the Falcons' defense. Had this been in sudden death and not the first possession of OT, it would have been a slam-dunk good decision to go for it. But because Atlanta would have needed more than a field goal to win on that drive, the payoff for successfully converting was not as high as it would have been in sudden death.