NFL eyeing proposal to abolish extra points

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by chiefzilla1501

The reason people are defending the PAT is because you are taking a football play away, and the only reason you're doing that... it's not because it makes the game more fair. It's not to keep players safer. It's because apparently running 8-10 more plays in a game is apparently too much to handle, because we were all apparently complaining that the game was too long. Nevermind that nobody ONCE on this board complained about extra points until Goodell even brought it up.

That's the problem.

Its not a football play. Its an idiotic ritual that is now outdated.

Any event which has a 99.6% chance of succeeding can no longer be considered a play, it is boring, uneventful, and pointless. The announcers do not even waste any time describing the extra point unless the super mega ultra-rare disaster happens. They yammer on about the touchdown, pause a moment to say the PAT was good, then continue talking about the play that ACTUALLY matters.

Just because we have had a few momentous events occur due to the PAT does not justify its existence. We are literally wasting hours of time per interesting event. Lets say a PAT takes an extra 30 seconds of time from lining things up, to kicking, to getting off the field. You have to watch 2 freaking hours of boring uneventful PAT's to see a missed one, and even then it often doesn't impact the game. That is too high a price to pay for the remote chance of it not being a total waste of time. This dumb ritual that people only defend because we've always done it that way before, is a waste of the players time, it is a waste of the teams time, and it is a waste of the fans time.

[alnorth]

To me, the PAT is similar to asking a player to run a 40-yard dash in 7 seconds after a touchdown on a wet muddy strip of turf to get the extra point. Even in domes, we could have a strip of wet muddy turf off the side of the field for the point after. You'll probably make it, but there's always a chance you slip and crash to the ground, probably a bigger chance than missing an extra point. Teams would probably have sure-footed fast specialists practicing the 1-point run, and we'd definitely have to watch it.

But it would be stupid. Just about as stupid, artificial, and contrived as the PAT. The only reason we don't think the PAT is stupid is because we've grown up with it.