Should the Broncos have gone for two after Fowler scored to try to put the game away?
I discussed this topic a few years ago, but it's come up in recent weeks after Pete Carroll went for two in a similar situation against the Patriots. Here, the Broncos were up 23-16 after the Fowler touchdown pending the extra point, again with about 3:02 to go.
There's two tantalizing benefits to going for two and trying to make it a nine-point game late. If you do it while there isn't much time left on the clock, you've basically ended the game -- the other team needs to find two possessions in an impossible length of time. The Chiefs could have scored twice in three minutes, but it would have required an expected onside kick recovery, which is somewhere in the 10 percent range.
The other benefit is that there's little punishment given how opposing coaches are likely to react. If you go for two and succeed to go up nine, the game is basically over. If you go for two and fail, the downside isn't all that bad. You're still up seven, and if the other team comes down the field and scores, they virtually never go for two to end the game in regulation, which is about a once-per-decade moment of coaching gutsiness.
Chase Stuart wrote about some of the problems in that logic back in 2012, though, and he correctly distilled it down to a simple choice. It's true that if you go for two and succeed, you win the game. It's also true, though, that if you kick the extra point, and the opposition responds with a touchdown, and then you stop the two-point conversion, you win the game. The question you should ask yourself in the situation, then, is simple: Do you think your offense has a better shot of succeeding on a two-point conversion than your defense does of stopping a two-point try?
Yes, I understand that the Chiefs would later go for two and get it to tie the game up at 24. We didn't know that with three minutes to go. In this case, Kubiak was right. Burke's model suggests the Broncos would have needed a 57 percent chance of converting the two-pointer to justify the move, and the outdated (pre-extra-point changes) model from Football Commentary is similarly dismissive, at 64 percent.
[
www.espn.com]
