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Whenever a team is trailing by seven points late in a game and driving, the talk quickly turns to whether it will go for 2 and the win if it happens to score a touchdown.
Tampa Bay, New England and Seattle all opted against it in Week 9 and ended up as overtime losers.
The situations weren’t entirely identical, with the Seahawks scoring with 51 seconds left, the Patriots on the final play with an exhausted Drake Maye and the Buccaneers with 27 seconds left and Patrick Mahomes on the other side. But the decisions and the outcomes were the same.
Were those necessarily bad decisions?
The data says maybe not, with teams opting to kick the extra point in the final minute of regulation having a slightly higher winning percentage than teams that go for 2 historically.
According to numbers tracked by Sportradar back to 2000, teams that attempted the extra point have a 37-49-2 (.432) record in those scenarios even after the three losses this week.
That includes two defeats when the kicker missed the extra point, 10 more losses when the opposing team scored before the end of regulation and six wins when the team got the ball back and scored — with five of those following turnovers.
Teams that tried for 2 had a 10-15 (.400) record, having made 12 of the 2-point tries. But two of those makes led to losses when the opposing team drove for a late field goal — including a game in 2019 when the Bears converted a fourth down after giving up the go-ahead 2-point try to Denver on the way to kicking a game-winning field goal.
Complicating the decision this year is that teams are converting 2-point tries at a record-low rate. From 2010-23, making the 2-point try had been essentially a coin-flip proposition, with teams converting 48.7% of tries. That has dropped to 32.4% during the first half of this season.
Streaking Chiefs
Kansas City’s overtime victory against Tampa Bay delivered another tight win to a Chiefs team that just seems to have a knack for pulling out nail-biters.
The Chiefs improved to 8-0, becoming the sixth Super Bowl champion to start the following season with eight straight wins — with six of those victories coming by seven points or fewer.
The Chiefs are the 41st team overall to start a season 8-0 and their average margin of victory of 7.0 points per game is the lowest of any of those teams, beating out the 2006 Colts, who were at 7.4 points per game on the way to winning it all.
Kansas City has won 14 straight since a Christmas loss to Las Vegas last year for the longest NFL winning streak since Carolina began the 2015 campaign with a 14-0 record. A win on Sunday against Denver would give the Chiefs the first 15-game streak since Green Bay won 19 in a row from 2010-11.
Winning close games is nothing new for Mahomes, who has a 49-12 (.712) career record in the regular season and playoffs in games decided by seven points or fewer. Only Daryle Lamonica has a better win percentage (.771) among quarterbacks who have started in at least 30 close games.
Perfection
When it comes to “ perfect” passer ratings, Lamar Jackson now stands alone.
Jackson completed 16 of 19 passes for 280 yards, three TDs and no interceptions in Baltimore’s win over Denver on Sunday to record his fourth career game with the highest attainable passer rating of 158.3.
Jackson has the most career regular-season games with at least 15 attempts and a perfect rating, having also done it once last season and twice in his first full season as a starter in 2019.
Four other QBs have done it three times: Peyton Manning, Kurt Warner, Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger. Manning also had a fourth in the playoffs, doing it in a 2003 wild-card win over Denver.
Jackson has seven straight games this season with a rating of 100 or better, tied for the eighth-longest streak ever.
Catch them all
Jared Goff and Amon-Ra St. Brown have an almost perfect connection this season.
St. Brown has caught his last 30 targets from Goff after the two went 7 for 7 in Detroit’s win over Green Bay. That is tied with Buffalo’s Khalil Shakir for the longest streak of catches without an incompletion for a wide receiver since NextGen stats began tracking the stat in 2016.
Zebra Sports calculated the probability that a player would have caught all of those targets based on the difficulty of each throw and said it had a probability of about 1 in 780,000.
For the season, St. Brown has caught 48 of 59 passes from Goff, with the 133.3 passer rating on those throws ranking No. 1 among all duos with at least 40 attempts, according to Sportradar.
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