Roger Goodell said a few weeks back that the league is considering getting rid of extra points after touchdowns. A better alternative could be to move them back by about 20 yards.
What should NFL do with extra points? There’s been some talk of getting rid of them entirely – just make touchdowns worth 7 points. If you want to go for 2 points, that theory goes, you can move back to 6 points and attempt a 2-point conversion.
I prefer the concept of putting the ball down on the 25-yard line. That would make extra points equivalent to 42-yard field goals. And from that range, we’d get the success rate we’d want – maybe 85 percent.
That may seem like an unusually difficult extra point, but kickers have gotten damn good over the years. The league average on kicks from 40-49 yards last year was 83 percent. Ten years ago, it was under 70 percent.
Moving those kicks on extra points, I think, makes a lot of sense. It makes kicker a much more valuable position, and it will also make it a lot more apparent which ones are really good as what they do. There would be a real risk of trying to sneak by an unproven youngster (think Randy Bullock, Caleb Sturgis or Dustin Hopkins).
Here’s the year-by-year accuracy on field goals of 40-49 yards over the last 15 years.
| Accuracy on field goals of 40-49 yards | |
|---|---|
| Year | Pct |
| 1998 | 69.6% |
| 1999 | 67.7% |
| 2000 | 69.8% |
| 2001 | 59.8% |
| 2002 | 64.3% |
| 2003 | 69.4% |
| 2004 | 72.0% |
| 2005 | 71.5% |
| 2006 | 73.5% |
| 2007 | 74.3% |
| 2008 | 74.5% |
| 2009 | 72.9% |
| 2010 | 73.4% |
| 2011 | 74.2% |
| 2012 | 80.2% |
| 2013 | 83.0% |
--Ian Allan