WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s advice that sounds like heresy on the gridiron: Go for it on fourth down. Try more onside kicks. Running backs don’t matter much.

But to stats geeks, this is the gospel from the spreadsheets.

The number-savvy economists, statisticians and refugees from Wall Street who revolutionized much of baseball in a way celebrated in the book and movie “Moneyball” are aiming their calculators at football.

But so far they aren’t making much headway. The complex team-oriented game is difficult to break down into interchangeable numbers, and the men who run the sport are even tougher to change. If baseball is in the 10th year of adopting “Moneyball” concepts, football is barely in year one, several sports number gurus say.

There is one NFL team that seems to best epitomize an increased amount of number-based decision-making, top sports statisticians agree. And that team, the New England Patriots, will be playing on Super Bowl Sunday for the fifth time in 11 years.

“The Patriots are the ‘Moneyball’ team of the NFL, no doubt about it,” said Brian Burke, founder of Advanced NFL Stats Inc. “The Patriots are in the Super Bowl because they have this system and stick to it. The Giants are in the Super Bowl because they are lucky.”

The statisticians are trying to bring mathematics and economics to decisions made on field strategy and player drafting. It’s called analytics and in many, but not all, ways it runs counter to decades of football philosophy.

The numbers show that:

— Icing the kicker — calling a last-second timeout to put more pressure on him — doesn’t work.

— The cliché that defense wins championships is wrong.

— Top first-round draft picks are overvalued compared to picks a bit lower. So says Tobias Moskowitz, a University of Chicago economics professor and co-author of the book “Scorecasting.”

Stats guys can spout the numbers proving them right. But when football teams hit the field and general managers compile their rosters, all that doesn’t seem to matter. They punt on fourth-and-2 even though they have a 75 percent chance of making a first down. They ice the kicker. And they talk about how it all starts and ends on the defensive side of the line, even though when Moskowitz ran the numbers, the best offense won as many championships as the best defense.

The presence of the Patriots in Sunday’s game, and the win by the New Orleans Saints two years ago, show that it’s nonsense to say defense wins championships, said Aaron Schatz, founder of Football Outsiders and a pioneer in the young field. “This year is the most offensively focused of all time,” he said. “These are the two worst defenses to ever play in the Super Bowl in terms of yards allowed.”

Sunday’s game also supports another mantra of the numbers geeks: “a running back is a running back is a running back.” Shane Reese, a statistics professor at Brigham Young University, said an average-to-good running back with an excellent line works just as well as a superstar running back.

“The running back is an overrated position,” he says.