The question of whether to go for two after a late touchdown from a team trailing by seven points has come up four times this week.
On Sunday, one coach who opted to pass on going for two (and lost in overtime) was asked about the coach who decided to go for two (and lost in regulation).
“It’s very interesting,” Patriots coach Jerod Mayo told reporters. “You’re always going to have people on either side, and I understand it. If it works, you’re a genius. If it doesn’t work, then you leave yourself open to criticism. It’s part of it.
“But again, there are so many factors that go into it. Whether you’re talking about analytics — all right, but analytics doesn’t take into account other things. What’s the weather? How’s the game flow going? What are the matchups? There are so many different things. I would say last night, [Bengals coach Zac Taylor] probably felt that was the best thing to do for his team. It’s easy to second-guess it, but it’s interesting. It is interesting.”
Mayo said more about Taylor’s decision than Mayo said about his own. And the biggest difference between Mayo on Sunday, Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald on Sunday, Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles on Monday, and Taylor on Thursday is that the Patriots scored their touchdown with zero minutes and zero seconds on the clock. This removed from the equation the factors arising from the remaining time.
Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford would have had 51 seconds to put his team in field-goal range. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes would have had 27 seconds to engineer a game-winning field goal. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson would have had 38 seconds. The Titans would have had nothing.
Patriots convert, they win. Patriots fail, they lose.
What would have happened after a successful two-point conversion with time remaining never gets discussed. Look at how the Ravens were moving the ball in the second half. Jackson could have pulled it off. (Of course, once-automatic kicker Justin Tucker might have missed the kick.)
So when Zac Taylor says the Bengals wanted to win the game, there’s no guarantee they would have won. The Ravens still could have pulled it off.
Then there’s the question of whether the Bengals would have won in overtime. If the Bengals had won the toss, would they have hot-knife-through-buttered their way through the Baltimore defense? Considering what Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase had done in regulation, maybe they would have.
On that note, and as Rodney Harrison mentioned during Friday’s PFT Live, Burrow didn’t even look Chase’s way on the two-point try, even though the Ravens had only one man on him.
Mayo is right. There are plenty of factors. In four specific cases in the past five days, four teams scored touchdowns in the final minute. Three went for one. One went for two. None of them won.
