The National Football League can currently claim to be the most popular American sport which naturally begs the question “How can we change a really, really good thing?” The answer may be to kill the extra point as we know it. The NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently spoke to that possibility while on “NFL Total Access” on the NFL channel. The reasoning is to remove the need for a “going through the motions” play that results in a successful kick in over 99% of all attempts. In 2013, there were only five misses over the 1,261 attempts. And never more than one per team. Over the last three years, 3,687 extra point attempts resulted in only 19 failures for an overall success rate of 99.5%. Not exactly “edge of your seat” stuff.

One proposal is to award seven points for a touchdown. A team would have the option to either accept that or try for one additional point via a run or pass. Success makes it an eight point score same as if a two point attempt was made in the current rules. BUT… failure to score would then deduct a point from the score essentially making a touchdown revert back to being a six point score like a failed two point conversion. Bottom line – if you can live with seven points then get ready for the kickoff.

The net result would likely prove to be inconsequential other than eliminating a play that succeeds 99.5% of the time anyway. It truly would not impact how often a team goes for that extra point because the current two point play already is really just an attempt to risk the one point to get a second point.

How this plays out in fantasy terms would be quite different. And in less than obvious ways.

Kickers are already the bane of fantasy drafts. You have to get one and yet aside from the likes of Matt Prater or Stephen Gostkowski, anyone you take is going to be more hunch than certainty. And the difference between the top kicker and the tenth best one is rarely more than one or two points per game. Would removing the extra point from the kicker’s production significantly change how he eventually ranks for the season? How big of a hit does his point total take?

What the above tables show is that there is not much change in how a kicker ranks without extra points other than for Matt Prater who dropped from #2 last year to only #16 thanks to all those Bronco touchdowns. But basically, a top ten kicker with extra points is a top ten kicker without extra points.

The average top ten kicker loses around 40 points per season without extra points. That’s roughly a third of his total points and kickers are the lowest of fantasy scorers anyway. Top ten kickers dropped from an average of 8.9 to 6.4 points per game last year. For 2012, it would have been 8.6 points falling back to only 5.9 on average. So about 2.5 fewer points per game.

Overall, eliminating extra points doesn’t really change who is good and who is bad much at all (apologies Matt Prater). And you only lose around 2.5 points per game on average. All that happens is that mostly the same set of guys are scoring two or three points less per game. At least it seems.

So is it correct to say that eliminating extra points is a non-event for what is already a low scoring position? Maybe not. One thing starts to suffer and that is the worst of all.

Consistency.

First off, there were only seven times that a kicker failed to score in a game during 2013. None of them were top ten kickers. When you started your kicker, you at least could count on a few points. But there were 81 instances in which a kicker failed to kick a field goal last year. Stephen Gostkowski was the only NFL kicker who recorded at least one field goal in every game. Matt Prater kicked nothing but extra points on four separate occasions. Mike Nugent and Josh Brown racked up six games with no field goals while .Sebastian Janikowski was left with five such instances. Accept you will have a week or two with the big, fat zero for your kicker score. And plenty of three point weeks as well.

Predicting how many total points a kicker scores is tough enough. Predicting how many times an offense stalls between the goal line and 35-yard line is impossible. And that assumes they make the kick.

The take-away from the concept that extra points are eliminated is that the game would speed up. There would be zero impact to all positions besides kickers who experience around a 30% drop in total points on average. And a low scoring, already inconsistent position becomes even more of a nightmare to project because their production relies solely on the number of fourth downs that occur inside the opponent’s 35-yard line.

Worse yet, even the best of all kickers are going to end up with a lot of zero or three point weeks. The lack of extra points only drops most kickers about two or three points per week but those were points preventing a kicker shutout in many cases. The proposed rule changes would improve the speed of the game.

And it renders the lowest scoring fantasy position to nothing more than a lottery scratch-off ticket each week. Given that you want to minimize random luck, it makes it hard to continue to include kickers as fantasy players.

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