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Whenever a team is down by seven points late in a game and leads, the discussion quickly turns to whether they will go for 2 points and win if they score a touchdown.

Tampa Bay, New England and Seattle all opted out in Week 9 and found themselves losing in overtime.

The situations weren’t quite the same, with the Seahawks scoring with 51 seconds left, the Patriots on the final play with an exhausted Drake Maye, and the Buccaneers with 27 seconds left and Patrick Mahomes on the other side . But the decisions and results were.

Were these necessarily bad decisions?

The data may not say so, with teams choosing to score the extra point in the final minute of regulation having a slightly higher winning percentage than teams that have historically scored 2.

According to numbers tracked by Sportradar since 2000, teams that have attempted the extra point are 37-49-2 (.432) in those scenarios, even after this week’s three losses.

That includes two losses when the kicker missed the extra point, 10 more losses when the opposing team scored before the end of regulation and six wins when the team got the ball back and scored – five of which came after turnovers.

Teams that attempted 2-point attempts were 10-15 (.400), having made 12 of the 2-point tries. But two of those goals led to losses when the opposing team made a late field goal — including a game in 2019 when the Bears converted a fourth down after giving up the 2-point try against Denver as they were about to score a goal. winning basket.

This year, the decision is complicated by the fact that teams are converting 2-point tries at a record rate. From 2010 to 2023, making a 2-point try was essentially a coin-flip proposition, with teams converting 48.7% of tries. This figure fell to 32.4% during the first half of this season.

Chefs in sequence

Kansas City’s overtime win over Tampa Bay delivered another close win for a Chiefs team that seems to have a knack for nail-biting.

The Chiefs improved to 8-0, becoming the sixth Super Bowl champion to begin the following season with eight straight wins – including six wins by seven points or fewer.

The Chiefs are the 41st team overall to start a season 8-0 and their average margin of victory of 7.0 points per game is the lowest of any of those teams, beating the 2006 Colts, who were at 7.4 points. per game along the way. to win it all.

Kansas City has won 14 straight since its Christmas loss to Las Vegas last year, which is the longest winning streak in the NFL since Carolina began the 2015 campaign with a 14-0 record. A win Sunday against Denver would give the Chiefs the first 15-game streak since Green Bay won 19 in a row in 2010-11.

Winning close games is nothing new for Mahomes, who has a career record of 49-12 (.712) in the regular season and postseason in games decided by seven points or fewer. Only Daryle Lamonica has a better winning percentage (.771) among quarterbacks who started in at least 30 close games.

Perfection

When it comes to “perfect” passer ratings, Lamar Jackson now stands alone.

Jackson completed 16 of 19 passes for 280 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions in Baltimore’s win over Denver on Sunday to record his fourth career game with the highest possible passer rating of 158.3.

Jackson has the most career regular season games with at least 15 attempts and a perfect mark, having also done it once last season and twice in his first full season as a starter in 2019.

Four other QBs have done it three times: Peyton Manning, Kurt Warner, Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger. Manning also managed a fourth game in the playoffs, in a 2003 wild-card win over Denver.

Jackson has seven straight games this season with a rating of 100 or better, tied for the eighth-longest streak all-time.

Catch ’em all

Jared Goff and Amon-Ra St. Brown have a near-perfect connection this season.

St. Brown caught his last 30 targets from Goff after the two went 7-of-7 in Detroit’s win over Green Bay. This is tied with Buffalo’s Khalil Shakir for the longest catch streak for a wide receiver since NextGen Stats began tracking the statistic in 2016.

Zebra Sports calculated the probability of a player catching all of these targets based on the difficulty of each throw and said it had a probability of about 1 in 780,000.

For the season, St. Brown has caught 48 of Goff’s 59 passes, with a passer rating of 133.3 on those throws, ranking him No. 1 among all duos with at least 40 attempts, according to Sportradar.