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Pete Carroll's decision to go for two worked out, but was it the right call?
When you consider how many factors there are in deciding in-game strategy, there might, after all, not be a “book” on when to go for two. We’re assuming Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll did a little book burning Sunday night when he went for the win on the road, eschewing conventional wisdom and trying to put his team up two scores instead of one.
The scenario: The Seahawks led 25-24 over the New England Patriots and scored a touchdown to go up 31-24 prior to the conversion. Carroll went for the carotid artery, attempting to go for the two-point conversion, and it even left Patriots head coach Bill Belichick — who appeared to be seen mouthing, “Why would they do that?” on the TV broadcast — a bit slack-jawed. (See the video at the top of the post.)
The conversion failed. The Seahawks then led by a touchdown and an extra point, as opposed to an eight-point lead that would have required the Patriots to score a TD and hit on a two-pointer just to send it to overtime. But had the Seahawks succeeded, Carroll looks brilliant; it’s now a two-possession game, lowering the Patriots’ chances at winning.
Was it the wrong call? Twitter raged on about this decision Sunday night in the aftermath. Some called Carroll foolishly arrogant. Others said he was brilliantly aggressive. It’s a great debate for sure.
Here’s the thing: The fact that the Seahawks won the game is absolutely immaterial. The fact is, as it was the Patriots could have won or sent it to overtime. They had the ball at the Seattle 2-yard line with 43 seconds left and ostensibly could have scored on any of the next four plays. (They didn’t and lost, of course.) But the end result — at least in the mind of a statistician — does not justify the means. A coach, however, might just have said, “shut up, stats geek” and made the aggressive call based on the flow of the game and several other conditions and not by the according-to-Hoyle numbers.
The point is that we have to look at what would have happened after each scenario and measure risk vs. reward for each.
Scenario No. 1: The Seahawks kick the extra point, so they’re up eight. We would have seen the Patriots drive with the same measure of aggressiveness had they been down seven. The extra-point try is an untimed down. The Patriots ran seven plays prior to reaching the 2-yard line and used up a little less than three minutes of clock and saved all their timeouts.
Scenario No. 2: The Seahawks failed on the two-pointer, so they’re up seven, which is how it played out in reality. See above for how the ensuing drive played out.
Scenario No. 3: The Seahawks go for two and make it. Now they’re up nine, and it’s a two-score game.
But here’s one small flaw in the first scenario: It assumes that kicker Steven Hauschka makes the extra point. He was 16-of-19 on extra-point tries, the worst conversion rate in the NFL so far (84.7 percent), and had one blocked earlier in the game. Hauschka also has missed two field-goal tries from 29 yards and in this season, both in outdoor games, so the 34-yard extra point was no gimme. At best it might have been 85 percent if we factor in Hauschka’s extra-point prowess and his combined field-goal rate on kicks 39 yards and in (12-of-14). It’s possible Carroll just didn’t trust his kicker to make and and felt like going for two was more than half as likely as kicking the single.
Now we have to decide whether the Seahawks going for two was more than, let’s say, a 43-percent certainty. It was their first try of the season, so there was no evidence to go off there. The Seahawks were 3-for-3 scoring TDs (on four plays) run from the opponents’ 2-yard line this season, although it’s not a perfect science because the Seahawks scored twice on first down and once on second down after failing on first. But in essence, had they failed on any of those tries they still would have had one or two more plays to score, plus the fallback of a field goal, so those plays do not have the urgency or finality of a third- fourth-down play, or a standard do-or-die two-point try.
Still, that’s a strong success rate no matter how you cut it. The Seahawks threw the ball, but the threat of the run — either by Russell Wilson or C.J. Prosise — was higher than normal, too, as the Seahawks had one of their best rushing performances of the season in this game. Wilson also had a career high in pass yards, so the Patriots basically had to defend every possibility. League-wide, two-point plays are typically successful about 54 percent of the time this season and were at 47.9 percent for 2015, so we can safely say it’s about a 50-50 proposition.
But — bottom line — does going for two give the Seahawks a better chance to win? Technically, no. Although the success rate of going for two actually results in a higher win percentage, as this statistical deep dive from SB Nation last summer shows, it might not be worth the risk of missing.
Then consider that being up seven points results in a 61.5 percent win chance (all win probabilities here via Pro Football Reference) for the Seahawks; going up eight increases that to a little more than 75 percent; but making it a nine-point lead only increases it to 85.2 percent. So technically, assuming the success rate of a two-point conversion is roughly a 50-50 deal, the Seahawks actually had more to lose (a 13.5-percent differential between being up seven vs. eight points) in missing than they did to gain by making it (a 10.2-percent differential vs. being up eight vs. nine).
Of course, there are always the factors that go beyond the raw historical data, which is how PFR derives its percentages. Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel detailed Carroll’s aggressiveness and what the coach’s rationale was at that very moment. Said Carroll: “We would be able to play [defense] differently down the stretch.” And that needs to be considered. This is still one of the top defenses in the NFL, and they’re best in their cover-3 defense, keeping everything in front of them, punishing receivers and making plays on the ball. Although Belichick might have appeared perplexed at the time the Seahawks went for two, he offered up some strong support for Carroll’s decision afterward: “That’s an aggressive call. An aggressive call on the road.”
On the opening weekend of the 2016 college football season, Minnesota head coach Tracy Claeys was skewered for going for two in the same situation — but with far less time left on the clock, less than 90 seconds remaining — in the Gophers’ seven-point win over Oregon State. An even better comp was back in a 2012 game between the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys. The Ravens were up one and scored with 4:49 left. They kicked the extra point (which drew postgame criticism too — damned if you do, damned if you don’t) and hung on when Dallas’ two-point try failed after scoring a TD with 31 seconds left. Amazingly, the Cowboys even recovered the ensuing onsides kick and had a very reasonable field-gold try from 51 yards miss in the waning seconds.
It boils down to thinking about how the Patriots would have responded down nine. They would have moved far more quickly, knowing they needed two scores to win, and would have taken more aggressive shots downfield. They had all three timeouts, plus the two-minute warning, at their disposal. The Patriots probably would not have run the ball, as they did twice before reaching the red zone, and would have attacked the sideline with the passing. Scoring twice would have been tough but far from impossible, even if the Seahawks recovered an onsides kick attempt. After all, the Patriots could have scored as it was with a little less than a minute left. Plus, Tom Brady had hit on six pass plays of 21 yards or longer in the game and was 12-of-16 passing for 204 yards in the second half against that defense.
So even though the aggressive, new-school approach might be to go for two in that situation, there was a lot of clock left, and it likely was the wrong call. But Carroll clearly had other ideas when he did so that went beyond math — his defense (settling into a three-deep look protecting against a two-score lead) vs. the Patriots offense, his kicking situation and just a general aggressiveness on the road that helped deliver a monster victory in a short week.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
