NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell continues to wave his mighty sword at what we know as the NFL. Now he wants to take away the point after touchdown, the extra point that makes the 6 a 7 and which, nobody ever misses. Well, almost nobody anyway. Of the 1,200 or so extra points attempted last season, only 5 failed to score and four of them were blocked.
So, obviously a strong case can be made that the extra point in professional football is so automatic as to have become boring and Mr. Goodell will not stand for boring. They are paying him over $30,000,000 each year to be sure that the NFL does not become boring and of course, that the league continues to make tons of money at the same time. The NFL brought home over $9 Billion (with a B!) last year. Divide that between the 32 team owners…
Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick is one powerful voice in favor of the ouster of the extra point. He told reporters, “I would be in favor of not seeing it be an over 99% conversion rate. It’s virtually automatic. That’s just not the way the extra point was punt into the game. It was an extra point that you actually had to execute and it was executed by players who were not specialists, they were position players. It was a lot harder for them to do, I don’t think that’s really a very exciting play because it’s so automatic.”
But that raises the question, what do you guys have in mind as a replacement for the time honored extra points? When discussing the matter at a recent press conference, Goodell said, “There’s one proposal in particular that I’ve heard about. It’s automatic that you get seven points when you score a touchdown, but you could potentially go for an eighth point, either by running or passing the ball, and so if you fail, you go back to six.”
Actually that sounds kind of cool and would add one more element to the chess game played down on the field by the head coaches. Take a chance and go for eight or stand pat with you seven points rather than risk the chance of losing a point and going back down to six. The old adage in football is that you never take points off the board, how will that apply in this situation?
