The extra point has always been one of the weirdest rituals in sports. It's not really a football play, and on the rare occasion that a missed PAT decides a game, it leaves fans with a sense of disappointment or even anger. A neutral fan would always prefer to see a game come down to overtime than on a random miss after a TD. The saving grace of the extra point is that it was nearly automatic and might only decide one game a year. But even still, it was a waste of time and probably should have been eliminated.
Now, according to the NFL's own math, the extra point will be roughly ten times more likely to miss. Not every extra point miss will impact the outcome of a game, but still, the odds that anyone's favorite sports team could be involved in a game decided by a non-football play just went up by a substantial amount. For all the things in football that could be fixed, I don't think anyone was clamoring for more missed extra points.
One other downside of this change is that it makes the fake-PAT essentially a thing of the past. Since it would now be snapped from the 15, not the 2. It would also basically eliminate those cutesy but very fun pre-snap formations that Chip Kelly likes to run before attempting option-PATs.
I did like that PATS can now turn into defensive scores. It will help make PATs feel slightly more like a real football play, and will make 2 point conversions a bit more exciting. It would have been nice if they had moved the 2-point conversion up a bit, but ultimately teams that go for two usually do it out desperation, not as a luxury, so incentivizing the two pointer is unlikely to move the needle much. Most NFL head coaches are notoriously risk averse.
I think the automatic 7 point TD with the option to gamble for two, or the status quo, would both be much better than this. Cutting down on the number of viewers who leave a minute early for the commercial break probably had more to do with this decision than pursuing the betterment of the game. I know this was technically decided by the competition committee, but to me this has the feel of Roger Goodell getting something he wanted.
Though I dislike this change from a football purist perspective since it more frequently allows PATs to decide games, the convenient truth is that this change probably helps the Seahawks. Steven Hauschka is one of the best short distance kickers in the league. This could prove to be a competitive advantage for our team.
