I hate it. I don’t understand why you want to put more significance on the kicker and, specifically, the PAT. The 1 point conversion SHOULD be nearly automatic. Was anyone complaining about it before?
Why wouldn’t you want to put more significance on the kicker? Why should there be an element of the game that’s “nearly automatic”? What other sport has pointless side games?
It’s says three but doesn’t say they were all fakes. It’s a reasonable guess since it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to line up the punter for a regular play, but then again these are the Browns.
Except that plays from the 1 are more boring in general. You see a more interesting balance of runs, passes, and trick plays from the 2.
I like this idea. Games decided on kicks suck.
No, it’s not “these are the Browns.” It’s “this is Tom Tupa.”
Well, yeah, but he was not the QB for the Browns when he scored three 2-pt conversions. The next line from the text you quoted is
I can’t find the actual statistics so it’s possible he lined up as QB for some of those conversions, but it isn’t likely. (And this is all a tangent to the main point, that fake PATs are exceedingly rare, especially after the newness of the 2-pt try wore off.)
Because football isn’t about kicking the PAT. And moving the attempt back to the 15 yard line makes it only very slightly less pointless. Until, like the Browns yesterday, you get a procedure and then a holding penalty and next thing you know you’re kicking a 48 yard PAT. Absurd.
Seriously, holding on a PAT attempt.
I wouldn’t mind if they mandated that XPs were drop-kicked, this would certainly eliminate the automatic point. In that event, bring it back to the 2 so that the coaches have to choose between an unsure single point and a somewhat more unsure two points.
Everything up until the “absurd” comment can be read as a pretty good argument for moving the PAT back.
I say it should be the punter trying to score a rouge. That would make it really interesting.
It’s part of the game. You might as well say football isn’t about penalties and get rid of those, too.
Was the PAT last year negatively impacting your enjoyment of watching football? Does the PAT this year enhance your enjoyment of watching football?
In terms of equating with penalties, it’s more like making pre-snap procedural penalties now worth 15 yards. It’s putting too much emphasis on a very small part of the game.
Kicking isn’t a small part of the game. It accounts for half the scoring, or 90% if the Browns are playing. It’s such an important part of the game it requires a dedicated player at the position, something no other play type does.
So more kicking enhances your enjoyment of watching football?
Sometimes, though not often. If the point of every rule change is to enhance my enjoyment of the game then most of the rules are useless.
One of the best games I ever saw was the 1990 NFC Conference Championship: Giants @ 49ers. From the Giants’ side, it was all field goals all the time.
Video recap of the game for any Giants fans that want to relive the awesomeness.
My favorite memory from that was the sideline report on Montana after the Leonard Marshall hit, when asked where it hurt: “It hurts all over.”
I don’t remember what year it was, but there was a London game with the Dolphins where it rained the whole time and the field was a mud pit. The final score was something like 6-3. It was awesome, though.
You might be thinking of this Dolphins / Steelers MNF game from 2007 (final score 3-0). However, that was in Pittsburgh.
No, it was a London game. This one, in fact (Giants “at” Dolphins 2007), though the score wasn’t as low as I thought.
Every team has now played ten games, so it might be a good time to peek at the stats. I hand-counted these, so they might be a bit inexact.
The extra point conversion rate is about 94.4% – about 1% of PATs get blocked.
Two point conversions are attempted at a rate of a bit under 8% of TDs, with the usual coin-toss success rate. Not sure how that compares to previous seasons.
So the rate of 6-point TDs is a bit over 9% overall. Some teams seem to have more misses than other teams, but even some of the most automatic of kickers have missed a conversion.
XP accuracy had been gradually growing better and better over the course of the past four or five decades; it’d only been at 99+% since 2000.
An accuracy rate in the low-to-mid 90% range puts it back where it was in the late '70s / early '80s.