volsunghawk":8m06irgb said:
I basically view a TD as being worth 7. If a team is down by six and they give up a TD, they didn't lose because of the chipshot extra point. They lost because a TD is worth a little more than 2 field goals. For this reason, I am okay with just eliminating the PAT and having an automatic 7 point TD.
Teams aren't going to change the way they play the game because of this rule, I don't think. Even at 90%, coaches will try for the PAT unless they need to go for 2. We've seen this in the preseason, teams aren't going for two anymore than they did before, they are just attempting the 33 yard PATs.
What this change does do is that it adds more randomness to the game, randomness that could come up very big in big moments in games.
You keep arguing like I am saying the rule is unfair. It's fair, it impacts both sides. I have never said it was unfair, that's never been my argument. I'm just saying that I don't like the randomness factor. I don't like games being decided by arbitrary luck any more than necessary, and this would make those occurrences more frequent, and worse yet, it would be on a play that had previously been an afterthought.
Replacement refs hurt both sides equally, and they made the game more interesting to be sure. But when fans saw their teams losing games because of this change, the outrage was volcanic. It's one thing for a team to lose a game by a mistake they made, it's another to lose a game because of bad luck, especially when the source of that bad luck is an arbitrary rule change. Unless teams find a kicker who can make almost 100% of these kicks, he's still going to miss some (probably 10%), and the timing of those misses is totally luck based.
If anything, I think this rule could be a clever scheme from Goodell to gain traction for eliminating the PAT completely in a couple years. Fans will be pissed off by this new rule when they get burned by it, and at least a few teams will lose a game at the last moment from this change out of a sample of 256 regular season games. After losing a game because of a 33 yard PAT, fans will be much more sympathetic to eliminating the PAT altogether.
I appreciate the intellectual way you view this issue, but to me football is also an emotional game, and there are certain ways to lose that are worse than others. For example, the pain of SBXL was so unique and awful because the officiating decided the game more than either team did. The Colts loss sucked extra because they were extremely lucky with calls and breaks. In both those cases, the losses hurt extra bad because the better team got very unlucky and the difference in luck decided the game. Longer PATs are fair, but I don't like how they increase the odds of a game being decided on luck for an arbitrary play.
Two point conversions are fun, but making or missing them is also heavily luck based (if one team goes 1/3 on 2 pointers and the other team goes 2/2, it probably has as much to do with BABIP type luck than skill in those situations). I think football would be worse off if teams went for two every time because it would insert more randomness into games. It would be fun, but it would muddy the game and allow teams to steal more wins with lucky performances than before. If the Seahawks are bad, I am less concerned with them getting lucky wins than I am with good Seahawks teams suffering unlucky losses. Ultimately, it would be nice if luck decided as few games as possible.
(The Lillard example was not meant to be taken literally, only to illustrate the emotional impact of "robbing" a team of a game winning play over an arbitrary extra hurdle. A 33 yard extra point makes every TD feel like it requires a follow-up "prove it" score. Which is fair, I'm just saying there are situations at the end of games where it could be deflating and ruin the ending to a game.)