Last Thursday, the Dallas Cowboys fell to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 24-16, a football game in which the heavily favored Cowboys fell behind early and came up short after a late comeback attempt. What makes this game notable is the furious public reaction to the Cowboys’ sound1 but counterintuitive endgame strategy, which echoes the furious public reaction to sound but counterintuitive public policy that we have discussed here previously.
First, a little necessary background about American football. Each team’s offense tries to move the ball down the field into the opponent’s end zone, and the defense tries to stop them. If the offense successfully reaches the end zone, they get 6 points, plus the chance to make an easy extra point kick, which would give them a total of 7 points. If they get stopped close to the end zone, they may opt to attempt to kick a field goal from wherever they are, which is worth 3 points. Finally, if they get stopped far away or lose the ball, they score zero points. Then the other team’s offense gets the ball and tries to score. That’s all we need to understand about football: teams generally score in 7s and 3s, and they trade possessions.
In 1994, the NFL began allowing teams to go for a two point conversion after a touchdown instead of kicking the extra point, emulating a popular option that had long existed at the college level. To earn two points, the offense gets one play to get the ball into the end zone from the two yard line; if they fail, they get zero points. Historically, teams convert two point conversions at about a 50% rate (46% in 2025), and kick extra points with close to 100% success (96% in 2025), so the expected value of each option is about the same: one point.2
Teams rarely go for two early in the game, when doing so just adds a lot of variance for no extra expected return. For example, scoring two touchdowns and attempting two two-point conversions nets you 16 points a quarter of the time (two successes), 14 points half the time (a success and a failure and vice versa), and 12 points a quarter of the time (two failures). If you score only 12 points off of two touchdowns, and you ultimately lose by one point, you will look like a complete idiot, whereas no one will remember when you heroically got 16 points.
However, as all finance nerds know, options are valuable! As the game nears the end and the range of possible point outcomes narrows, there will be situations where the upside from scoring 2 additional points is high while the downside of coming away with zero points (instead of one point) is low. Specifically, there is a discontinuity right where regulation ends in a tie: a 2 point loss is worth the same as a 1 point loss (that is, nothing), whereas a tie gets you to overtime, where you have a 50% chance of winning.3 That is exactly the scenario that the two point option is useful for.
A trivial example would be a team that trails by 8 at the very end of the game and scores a touchdown, leaving it down two points. A kicked extra point is worthless because it leaves them with a one point loss. Going for two gets them to overtime half the time, and leaves them with a two point loss half the time. The expected value of this touchdown is still 7 points (half the time they get 6, and half the time they get 8), but the additional variance from going for two takes this team from a sure loss to a 25% chance of victory (since they need to convert the two and then win in overtime).
Since teams almost always score in 3s and 7s (or 8s, if the strategy calls for it), you can work backwards to find other situations where going for two is valuable late in the game. Take a team that is losing by 11 and scores a touchdown with a few minutes left, leaving them down 5. They still need to score again to win, but a two point conversion here would get them within 3. It is much easier to score a field goal than a touchdown, so getting to a 3 point deficit gives them an option to kick a field goal for a tie later, whereas they will need a touchdown later regardless of if they are behind by 4 or 5.
Similarly, a team that is up by one after scoring a touchdown late in the game will want to go for two, because it gives them a chance to get to a 3 point lead, just in case the opposing team is able to respond with a field goal. Otherwise, there is no difference between a one and two point lead (which would transform into a two or one point deficit if they give up a field goal).
You can work through every possible point scenario in this manner to get an idea of when it might make sense to go for two late in a game. This is something teams have done, creating charts and cheat sheets that NFL coaches can work from in game situations. The basic principle is always the same, though: go for two instead of one when two points is likely to help you win a lot more than zero points will hurt you.
This brings us back to last Thursday’s Cowboys game. Traditionally, teams that found themselves trailing by 14 points near the end of the game would seek to score two touchdowns and kick two extra points to get the game to overtime. Assuming they actually managed to score two touchdowns, they would expect to win 50% of the time. According to ESPN, this was the universal approach NFL teams took through 2017. This is the intuitive way of thinking about the game: keep it simple, play for the tie, avoid losing long enough and you will eventually win.
At some point, some bright analyst realized that if you have to score two touchdowns, you have two sequential two-point options to work with. You can combine these to your advantage, as long as you start by going for two after your first touchdown:4
If you go for two on your first TD and make it (50% odds), you should choose to kick on your second TD (100% odds) and score 15 total points, for a one point regulation victory. This will be the outcome (50% x 100%) = 50% of the time.
If you fail on your first two point attempt, you have to go for two on the second TD, which will give you 14 total points and overtime if you succeed. This will be the outcome (50% fail the first time x 50% succeed the second time) = 25% of the time.
Or you might fail both attempts and get only 12 total points and lose by two in regulation. This will be the outcome (50% fail the first time x 50% fail the second time) = 25% of the time.
Now you’ve shifted the outcomes so that you have a 62.5% chance of winning the game instead of 50% (again, assuming you score two TDs): 50% if you make the first conversion and win by one, plus 12.5% because you score your second conversion and get to overtime a quarter of the time, and once in overtime you win half the time.
Note that you will still score 14 points in expectation; you’ve just shifted the distribution around so you get 15/14/12 points 50%/25%/25% of the time, and that translates to a 62.5% overall chance of winning instead of the 50% you get from scoring 14 points 100% of the time.
Put another way, you are rigging it so you get exactly 3 points from 2 conversion attempts 50% of the time, which gives you a win in regulation by exactly one point, and the sacrifice you have to make make is that now you get zero points from 2 conversion attempts 25% of the time, which gives you a two point loss in regulation. The other 25% of the time, you get two points from two conversion attempts and go to overtime just as you did when you were kicking, just in a pattern of 0+2 instead of 1+1.
Also note that this approach follows the exact same principle as the original trivial scenario where you are losing by 8, score a touchdown, and go for two. In that scenario you are trading a sure one point loss for a 50% chance of a tie and overtime and a 50% chance of a two point loss. The only thing that makes the new scenario unfamiliar is the combination of two conversion attempts; you can see that the underlying intuition and logic is still the same, in that you are simply strategically exercising your options to squeeze out a higher overall chance of winning.
ESPN reports that between 2018 and 2023, teams started adopting this strategy, attempting it 24 times over those six years. A Reddit post by u/sleeperaxe claims that teams have gone for two 25% of the time in this situation since 2019, and former Eagles analyst Ryan Paganetti said that teams went for two 50% of the time in the 4th quarter in this situation in 2025, so this strategy is becoming more popular, but far from universal. Yesterday, the Giants found themselves in this situation against the Commanders and went the traditional route of kicking the extra point after the first touchdown with 7:20 left in the game. They then forced a stop and scored another touchdown with less than 2 minutes left, kicked another extra point to tie the game, and made another stop to get to overtime, which ultimately ended in a rare tie.
Anyway, the Cowboys trailed by 14 late in their game, scored a touchdown with 5:26 left, and decided to go for two, and let me tell you, boy did it make people mad. Part of the problem was that the Cowboys missed the two point attempt and then threw an interception while driving for the the second touchdown, which left their fans in a bad mood. Former players, commentators, and fans took to the internet to condescendingly explain to the “spreadsheet nerds” that the strategy is dumb, their math is wrong, and even if the math is somehow right, the game isn’t played in a spreadsheet and the human element will cause the strategy to fail.
When reading these criticisms, one thing that becomes clear is that most critics have an emotional reaction to the strategy first, publicly denounce it, and then have to scramble to backfill a logical reason to justify their original opposition. Since they never understood the strategy in the first place, their objections make no sense. As compiled by Twitter user Sammy Reid, here is a sampling of popular justifications:
“There’s no confusion. You can win the game in regulation by going for 2 after scoring the second touchdown. Going for two makes no sense because if you miss, now when you get the second TD, the best you can do is tie.” (Note: The value of the strategy is the 50% chance of winning if you make the two after the first TD, plus the 12.5% chance of winning if you fail the first attempt but you make the second; if you just go for two after the second TD, you only have a 50% chance of winning.)
“My take is that this is all gobbledygook. If you’re going to pin the logic on math, well, the math says go for 2 literally every time.” (Note: No it doesn’t, in fact the whole strategy only works because you can choose not to go for two on the second TD after making the first, allowing you to stick with your one point lead. If you don’t do that, none of this works.)
“The math ain’t my issue. I get your formula. It [sic] not take into account the context of the game & assumes that two point convs are a 50-50 that if you don’t get the first, you will definitely get the second.”5 (Note: It definitely does not, it’s just that the 50% chance of getting the first one and winning in regulation plus the 25% chance of getting the second one and going to overtime is enough to outweigh the approach of getting to overtime 100% of the time.)
“Dear lord…if I have to hear more of these Unnecessarily Go For 2 types say the word “math”...it’s not about that. It’s about risk tolerance. Miss the first time, and if you get another TD you have one play NOT TO LOSE.” (Note: You have a 50% chance of making it the first time and winning outright, which is the same as your odds of winning in overtime with the “risk-averse” approach; as a bonus, you still have a second chance to make it and get to overtime.)
Some critics avoid this trap and claim that they are more capable of seeing the pitfalls of this approach as executed by humans on the field, as opposed to numbers in a spreadsheet. The idea is that kicking the extra point is psychologically valuable and keeps the momentum going, whereas a missed two pointer stops the momentum and makes it harder to score again later. The problem here is that 80% of the win probability in this strategy comes in the scenario where you make the first two point attempt, setting yourself up for a regulation win instead of overtime. There is value in having another bite at the apple later, but that’s more of a bonus.6 Also, why isn’t it symmetrical?7 Shouldn’t the psychological blow of giving up a two point conversion make it harder for the other team to defend against the other touchdown you need later on? And for that matter, why isn’t momentum a concern when you are down 5 and attempting a two pointer to get within a field goal, something no one questions? What is so special about being down 8 and trying to get within 6?8
The funny thing about the criticism of analytics and spreadsheets is that there are basically no analytics or spreadsheets involved with this strategy at all. There are no advanced statistical models or arcane concepts like EPA; there is nothing more complicated than basic addition and multiplication.9 It is in fact a simple extension of the basic two point conversion scenarios that everyone accepts, and follows the exact same principles. The only twist is that this scenario has to consider two conversion attempts in sequence, instead of just one, and so the result is not intuitive if you’ve never seen it before. But anyone can map out the entire decision tree in a minute and see for themselves how it works, and they can think about it for a few more minutes and satisfy themselves that there is correct intuition behind it.
We talk a lot here about misguided populist objections to widely accepted economic concepts like new housing, or stock buybacks, or ride-hailing. These are all areas where people find some element of the expert model to be counterintuitive: for example, the idea that new housing lowers rent runs contrary to their experience where new housing is associated with higher rent, or the idea that stock buybacks ultimately allow investors to fund productive new investment elsewhere in the economy clashes with the common sense understanding that buybacks are wasteful and manipulative. All of those topics are complex enough where people can convince themselves that their intuition is tapping into some deeper truth that they can’t properly articulate, and that all of the statistical and logical “evidence” presented to the contrary is sophistry put forward by smug elites doing the bidding of their paymasters.
The debate over going for two down 8 is much lower stakes, but follows the exact same pattern as every populist movement we ever see in public policy. People assume that their personal familiarity with a topic puts them on an equal or better footing than the experts that study the topic deeply (and have personal familiarity with to boot); for example, people who pay rent every month feel fully qualified to lecture the economists that study the theory and practice of rent control. In reality, the intuitions we develop from experience are made up of a hodgepodge of heuristics that sometimes fail to capture crucial elements of reality, and even worse, some of them are based on illusions and are actually precisely the reverse of the relationships that exist in reality, as in the relationship between new housing and rent.
When a critic sees a team executing a strategy that strikes them as misguided, they come in hot, accusing the coaches and executives of gross incompetence, because even a braindead fan can see the folly in their approach. However, when pressed for details, they always come back with a contradictory mess of arguments and fallacious reasoning, because their objection was always based on vibes, not logic. Even if they realize at this point that something is wrong, they are in too deep; they’ve already publicly staked their credibility on their original position and they can’t back down, and in any case they’ve already cast their lot with the anti-spreadsheet tribe and can’t defect. At this point there is a lot of hand-waving and gesturing to vaguely defined second-order effects until the other side gets tired and moves on with their lives. If this is the case with something as simple and trivial as going for two down 8, one can begin to understand how populist politicians self-destruct with more complex high-stakes topics like tariffs or price controls or housing restrictions.10
Criticisms of going for two down 8 will likely continue to persist for at least a few years because the teams that try it will usually lose, just as the Cowboys did. They won’t lose because it’s a bad strategy, they will lose because teams that are down by a touchdown late in a game and about to give the ball back are in a really bad position and no strategy can do much to help them. For example, if you are down by 8 points late in a game after a touchdown and you kick the extra point, you still need 3 independent events to all happen:
You need to stop the other team from scoring, which happens on about 67% of drives in the NFL;
You then need to score a touchdown yourself, which happens on 22% of NFL drives;
You need to win in overtime, which is a 50% proposition.
This is an unscientific approach, but multiply 67% x 22% x 50% and you get a 7.4% chance of winning. Going for two down 8 lets you replace 50% with 62.5%, which only raises your odds to 9.2%. The actual odds of winning seem to be a bit higher, probably because teams can go all out to try to score the second touchdown at the end of the game, but not by much: Eagles Eric on Twitter finds that teams that kick have won 12.6% of the time since 2015, while teams that went for two won 9.3% of the time. (There are huge error bars on both estimates, since the sample sizes are small, and the difference could easily be driven by selection effects or a different offensive environment in the more recent years when teams started going for two; for example, 2024 had a very low two point conversion rate as defenses rolled out new strategies.)
The best case scenario is that as going for two down 8 becomes more common, a new generation will grow up without the memory of the old approach, and the grumpy old sports talk radio hosts and columnists will retire and go away, and pretty soon the debate over this strategy will disappear with them. Already this has happened in baseball in the nearly quarter century since Moneyball, and it has begun to happen in football with more modern strategies like aggressively going for it on fourth down, which only became popular in the last decade. Like most populist movements, bad football strategy cannot be defeated, it can only fade into irrelevance.
When I say the strategy is sound, I mean that it is probably a good approach on average, and that people who object to it universally are misguided. As with all strategies, there will be case-by-case exceptions based on the strengths and weaknesses of individual teams and players and their opposition, and it is actually quite possible that the Cowboys, as a rare heavy favorite to find themselves behind by 14 points late in a game, might have been better advised to take a different approach, although probably not.
We will use 50% for the odds of a two point conversion and 100% for a one point kick throughout here for simplicity; substituting in more precise probabilities doesn’t make a material difference.
There is another jump in win probability between a tie and a one point lead, from 50% to 100%, but it’s not a discontinuity with an exploitable asymmetry, because the difference between a tie and a one point deficit takes you from 50% to 0%. Teams do sometimes go for two when trailing by 1, but it’s widely understood to be a coin flip with no inherent advantage, excepting the specific scenario in overtime where the rules dictate that a successful two point conversion ends the game and a kick to tie the game gives the ball back to the other team.
This scenario is known as going for two down 8 because you are down by eight points immediately after scoring your first touchdown but before deciding whether to kick the extra point or go for two. Also note that in reality, there might be additional possessions before the end of the game beyond the ones laid out here, but the general strategy is robust enough that it shouldn’t matter much.
Later on the same user claims to have graduated from USC with a 3.86 GPA, which honestly checks out.
There are a lot of “what if you miss” objections that fall short for this reason. You have a 50% chance of missing, yes, but if you miss you are still alive with a meaningful chance to win. If you play for overtime, you have a 50% chance of losing in overtime, but if you lose in overtime the game is over.
I saw this point somewhere on Twitter, but I lost the source. Sorry to whoever this was: it’s a good point!
Also, I can think of a lot of soft objections to the traditional approach. If you are behind by 14 points late in the 4th quarter, doesn’t it follow that your odds of winning in a 10 minute overtime period are probably lower than your odds of making a single two point conversion? Don’t you want to avoid overtime if at all possible to reduce injury risk and avoid wearing your team out?
The math is so basic that I didn’t use a calculator, spreadsheet, or even pencil and paper while writing this post (except in the tiny section at the end discussing actual data), although I grant that I am cheating by using round approximations throughout.
Interestingly, we can probably be more confident about public policy than we can ever be about football, simply because every populist policy has been attempted so many times over the years, giving us a rich dataset. A niche strategy like going for two down 8 will always be hamstrung by small effect sizes and small sample sizes, so it is difficult to know if it works in practice nearly as well as it does in theory; there is also the possibility that some second order effect eventually emerges to turn it on its head. For example, one theory holds that the team with the lead will usually be inclined to play too conservatively on offense, and a successful two point conversion will “wake them up” and cause them to play with more optimal aggression. However, most of the objections here are that the strategy doesn’t even work in theory, which is plainly not the case.