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BGonline.org Forums
OT -- Weekend Football Observations -- Long
Posted By: Steve Mellen In Response To: OT -- Weekend Football Observations -- Long (Bill Riles)
Date: Monday, 25 October 2010, at 6:12 p.m.
If you miss the initial two-point conversion you also give your opponent additional flexibility. Say everything goes in your favor and you pin the opponent on his own one yard line on fourth down. If he's eight ahead he's punting. If he's nine ahead he can always take a safety and free kick from his twenty.
After all this talk about the all-important difference between a one-possession game and a two-possession game, you think the team leading by 9 should voluntarily make it a one-possession game just to get some extra space for their kick? Hard to see how that could ever be right.
Of course, the very fact that we're talking about the correct strategy in this situation demonstrates that it was an exaggeration to say the game is over if the two-point conversion is missed. It is very hard to score twice in three minutes, no question about it, but hardly impossible. If it's impossible - or so rare that it's not worth even talking about - then the team leading by 9 should definitely punt, right? They can't lose!
In basketball you trail by five points w/ a very few seconds left and w/ the ball. You come down the court and the opponent is very closely guarding any three point shot attempts but is conceding you the lay-up. What do you do? Seemingly, most of you shoot the three pointer anyway. I take the lay-up. It's called a 'two possession' game for a reason.
Basketball and football are two different games with different strategies, but we can analyze this situation anyway. If you take the free lay-up (I often see teams miss the "free" lay-up in this situation, actually, because lightly contested is not the same thing as contested), you have one way to win the game: get the ball back without the opponent scoring - meaning they either miss two free throws or you steal the ball - and then you have to hit a 3-pointer to tie. If that 3-pointer was going to be an open shot then that might be a good idea, but in most situations it's going to be every bit as contested as the 3-point shot you're passing up on this possession. So you have only one parlay and it involves hitting the exact same difficult 3-pointer.
If you take the 3-point shot now, you have a number of additional parlays. The opponent might make one free throw (considerably more likely than missing both) and now you still have a 3-point opportunity to tie. If the opponent misses both or you steal the ball, now you can win with a 3-pointer instead of merely tying. You might rebound your missed 3 and put it back or get fouled.
But let's assume instead that if you miss the 3-pointer you're completely cooked. The point remains - and this is true of the football scenario as well - EVERY winning scenario involves hitting a contested 3-point shot at some point in the next few seconds.
But basketball is more complicated. Let's stick with football. Assign some numbers to the probability of making a two-point conversion, scoring a second touchdown, etc., and you'll find there is nothing whatsoever to be gained by putting off the inevitable two-point conversion attempt for another day. But you have to actually do the math, not just say "if you fail the two-point conversion you lose."
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