One more time: Why NFL teams go for two when down eight points late

Greg Auman

NFC South Reporter

This is not a new argument.

We want to explain to any lingering doubters why it’s smart for a football team to go for two after scoring a touchdown late in a game to pull within eight points. Yes, an extra point puts the team down seven, and then another TD and another extra point would tie the game and give the team a chance to win in overtime.

Nevertheless, the team should go for two.

“The math has been clear for so long, and been presented by so many writers, that this topic is essentially beating a dead horse,” reads an article written by Football Perspective eight years ago.

If it was beating a dead horse in November 2015, why is it still a debate? What’s next, an edgy story about how cigarette smoking might be bad for your health? A think piece on how seat belts save lives?

The problem is that football can lean too much into conventional wisdom, and that wisdom really can and should change over time.

Here’s the logic in a nutshell: You’re down 14 points, and scoring touchdowns and kicking extra points twice only gets you to overtime, and the goal is to win the game, not make it to overtime and give yourself a coin-flip chance of winning. If you go for two the first time and make it, another touchdown and extra point would allow you to win in regulation. If you go for two the first time and fail, you can still score a touchdown and go for two and tie the game.

And since the NFL shifted to longer extra points in 2015, the math is impressively close: a success rate of about 47.5% going for two, and about 94% on kicking extra points. That will vary from team to team, but as a general rule, the two paths lead to the same number of points over time. This year, NFL teams converted 55.1% on two-point conversions, making an even more compelling case to go for two in these situations.

And yet when they come up in games, football fans need to have the rationale explained to them as if it’s something cutting-edge and new.

“When you add the two things together, it is very favorable to go for two in that situation,” NBC’s Cris Collinsworth explained in the divisional playoffs after the Bucs went for two, down eight to the Lions in the fourth quarter.

The Bucs lost 31-23, and some people will say that shows you shouldn’t go for two. They never got the second touchdown, and that’s why they lost, not because they went for two on the first TD. Being down 14 points in the fourth quarter doesn’t yield many comeback wins, but there were two this past season that took that exact path to victory.

In Week 3, the Packers trailed the Saints 17-3 in the fourth quarter, scored a touchdown with 6:58 left, went for two and got it. Down six, Green Bay got the ball back, scored again with 2:56 to play and took the lead on Anders Carlson’s extra point, eventually winning 18-17.

“Why are we going for two?” FOX analyst Jonathan Vilma explained in real time, before the conversion was even attempted. “It’s a one-possession game, 17-9. If you don’t get it, it’s still a one-possession game. If you do get it, now you only need a touchdown and possibly an extra point to win the game. New-wave NFL, new-wave analytics. I like the aggression. I don’t know if I agree with it, but I do like the thought process.”

Then in Week 14, the Titans were down 27-13 to the Dolphins in the fourth quarter, got a touchdown with 2:40 left, went for two and got it. Down six, they got the ball back, scored again with 1:49 to play and took the lead on Nick Folk’s extra point, winning 28-27.

Again, this is not a new argument. But normalizing the idea of going for two is important for some writers. ESPN’s Mina Kimes has a short video explaining it as her pinned tweet, referencing a helpful 2019 article by Seth Walder.

Another good explainer, published by the Northwestern Sports Analytics Group in 2020, lays it out as a simple probability exercise, noting that if you reduce going for two to a 50-50 proposition (which it’s close to) and extra points as a lock, going for two down eight late gives you a 62.5% chance to win when you score another touchdown, compared to the 50-50 gambit of just playing for overtime. The group’s math says the actual advantage could be closer to 15% when using the real stats.

Now the math isn’t the same for all teams. We told you NFL teams converted 55.1% of their two-point conversions in 2023, but there’s a wide disparity from team to team. The top 16 teams converted 76.7%, but the bottom half converted just 35.6%, so instead of a coin flip, it might be more like a 1 in 3 chance for a lesser team.

What’s more, good teams lead more often, and teams leading don’t need to go for two. The two teams meeting in the Super Bowl, the Chiefs and 49ers, didn’t convert a two-point conversion in the entire regular season. San Francisco never attempted one, and Kansas City missed on its only attempt. There are good offenses that fare poorly in two-point tries: Green Bay, which had an NFL-best 95% touchdown rate in goal-to-go situations, went just 2-for-5 on two-point conversions, while Carolina, with the worst offense in the NFL, went 3-for-3.

Are the Chiefs the new Patriots?

It takes time to win people over to understanding the math of going for two. In 2017, an analysis by FiveThirtyEight showed that in 2015-16, there were 27 situations where teams scored touchdowns in the fourth quarter to pull within eight, and in all 27, they’d chosen to kick, when even back then the analytics called that a “clearly incorrect decision.”

In 2018, the idea gained visibility when it came up twice in three weeks. The Eagles, down 20-6 to the VIkings, scored and went for two and got it, still ultimately losing. Pro Football Talk, while supporting the move, called it a “highly unusual decision.”

Two weeks later, the Giants, also down 20-6, went for it and failed on the way to a loss, but it brought attention to the decision and why it was the right call, even in a loss. “Math is hard, but it’s not that hard,” wrote a USA Today story supporting the move.

It might not come up in the Super Bowl — nobody wants a 14-point game in the fourth quarter, right? — but at some point next season, a team will be down 14 late and it will score a touchdown. Ideally, fans watching the coach confidently hold up two fingers on the sideline will jump up from their couches and say, “They’re going to go for two!” rather than ask, “Why would they do that?”

If not, this is something we can come back to one more time.

Greg Auman is FOX Sports’ NFC South reporter, covering the Buccaneers, Falcons, Panthers and Saints. He is in his 10th season covering the Bucs and the NFL full-time, having spent time at the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.