The first four weeks of the N.F.L. season have been filled with surprises, but there has been one constant: the extra point.
Three hundred nine times, kickers have lined up for an extra-point attempt, and 309 times they have converted. In fact, the last time an extra point was missed in a regular-season game, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, was last Dec. 26, when Cincinnati’s Clint Stitser sent the ball wide left in a win over San Diego.
This is no mere aberration. For the better part of a decade, the accuracy rate for extra points has hovered around 99 percent, making the kick itself seem equal parts automatic and superfluous.
Twenty-one teams did not miss a single extra point attempt last season. San Francisco has not missed since 2003; Chicago, Tennessee and Seattle have made every one since 2005. In 2008, no team missed through the first seven weeks of the season. All that precision raises the question: what is the point of the extra point?
In August, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick basically said that there was none, unless extra points were made to be longer than their current 19 yards.
“Philosophically, plays that are nonplays shouldn’t be in the game,” he said in an interview with the radio station WEEI, adding, “It is not a play.”
The spot of the ball for extra points has been the 2-yard line since 1929. Before 1929, the sport experimented with at least three different distances for the extra point, including spots from the 5-yard line and the 3-yard line.
In the early days of professional football, extra points were an adventure. In 1932, for example, kickers made just 67 percent of their attempts. The next year, the league moved the goal posts from the back of the end zone to the goal line and accuracy improved accordingly. In 1974, the league moved the goal posts back again, creating the current kicking distance, and accuracy went down.
Kickers say that accuracy has improved over the years not just because kickers are better, but also because of the professionalization of snappers as a distinct position, and improved offensive lines and playing fields. (If an extra point is not attempted because of a bad snap, it does not count as a miss for the kicker.) But despite accuracy rates approaching perfection, kickers insist that extra points are not as easy as they look.
“It’s not a gimme,” said the retired kicker Max Zendejas, who once missed three extra-point attempts in a game.
Detroit defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh found that out last year when he was called on to fill in for an injured Jason Hanson and promptly shanked a P.A.T. into the right upright.
Perhaps the most infamous miss came in December 2003, when Saints kicker John Carney missed what would have been a game-tying attempt against Jacksonville after the Saints scored on a stunning three-lateral play that came to be known as the River City Relay.
Matt Stover cannot remember many of the 591 extra points he made during his 19-year N.F.L. career. But the three he missed can be recalled at a moment’s notice (“left, right and right”). After a miss in October 1996, he made 422 in a row until his retirement in 2010. He made 99.5 percent of his attempts in his career, but only received letters from fans about the errant ones.
“They’d want you to know what a dumb play that was,” Stover said. “It was like, how dare you miss an extra point.”
Joe Nedney knows the feeling. He had not missed an extra point in six years when he retired before this season, but he once missed three attempts in the first half of a college game for San Jose State. That prompted a sarcastic ovation when he made one after halftime.
“As long as you do your job, no one says anything to you, but as soon as something goes wrong, everyone looks at you like you’ve got a third eye,” he said.
Zendejas had more to worry about than most kickers when he was playing.
“Back then, there were four Zendejas kicking in the N.F.L., and if one of us missed an easy kick, we all missed,” he said. “Fans would confuse us, and we’d all get blamed.”
The former Giants kicker Raul Allegre missed a seemingly insignificant attempt in the waning minutes of a 39-20 victory in Super Bowl XXI and was inundated with hate mail.
“I got more letters from that miss than anything good I ever did for the Giants,” said Allegre, now an ESPN analyst. “All the people that had 0-0 slots in their office pools were after me. People blamed me for not sending their kids to college, for missing their rent checks, unpaid bills, not having food to eat.”
Some kickers get more than just blame when they miss. Stover and Nedney won jobs early in their careers after other kickers missed preseason extra-point attempts and were released. In perhaps the most unfortunate incident, Steve Little, a first-round draft choice in 1978, was released in his second season after missing in consecutive weeks. On the night he was released, he was in an auto accident and was rendered a quadriplegic.
Some kickers say their jobs are hard enough without moving the ball back on extra-point attempts, and that eliminating them altogether would marginalize an already underappreciated craft. But others say changes could add excitement to a play that is now little more than an opportune time for fans to take a bathroom break.
Zendejas said he would like to see the extra point eliminated. Allegre said he “loved the idea of moving the P.A.T. back,” but did not want to see it eliminated.
But Seattle kicker Steven Hauschka said he thought that most active kickers wanted to keep the extra point as it is. He noted that if the league moved the ball back considerably, many games would be decided by missed extra points, which is probably not what the league wants.
“If you wanted to change the percentage considerably, you’d have to move it back to 30-35 yards in order to get it down near 90 percent,” he said.
Stover and Nedney say they also favor the status quo.
“Belichick can say what he wants, and he was my coach in Cleveland, but you’d be changing the whole game if you changed the rules,” Stover said. “The point system would change; that whole decision — do we go for 1 or 2? — that would be gone.”
Nedney said that moving the kick back or eliminating it would be just the latest example of making life more difficult for kickers.
“I always feel like there’s this subset of people that want place-kickers eliminated from the game,” he said. “You hear rumblings about it, that we’re a necessarily evil, we’re not real football players, just give the players 7 points when they score, or narrow the uprights to make it harder on kickers. I see that as, we must be doing something right because we’re making it look too easy and the league wants to make it more challenging for us.”
