Lions coach Jim Caldwell believes the NFL’s new rule moving extra point kicks back 13 yards will lead to far more two-point conversion attempts this season.
“When you go on the road with the wind and all those conditions, it may make you think about going for two a little bit more often,” Caldwell said, via Josh Katzenstein of the Detroit News. “But even more so, I’m sure there are going to be some teams that we play against — we may be one of them — that decide to go for two every single time. So with the point differential, you’re going to have to be good at that particular execution of the two-point play.”
Actually, no team is going to go for two every single time. A team that scores a touchdown to tie a game late in the fourth quarter would always kick the one-point extra point, rather than go for two.
But Caldwell may be right that some team will make going for two the default position, and only kick the extra point when the difference between one point and two would be insignificant. If a team is confident that its offense has a better than 50 percent chance to score from the two-yard line, it would make a lot of sense to go for two regularly. For that matter, a team that’s confident its offense can score from the two-yard line more than 50 percent of the time should have been going for two regularly even before the NFL changed the rule to make extra point kicks a little harder.
Eventually, the NFL may change the rules enough so that two-point conversions become more common than one-point extra points. Maybe that will come from moving the two-point conversion up to the 1-yard line, or from moving extra point kicks even farther away from the goal post.
If Caldwell is right, extra points are going to get a lot more interesting this year.