Published Dec. 20, 2021
The best thing to happen this NFL season is that coaches are going for it on fourth down more than ever before. The worst thing to happen this season is the people who are paid to talk about football on television are whining about it at a similarly extreme rate.
The NFL set a record for the most fourth-down attempts last season (beating the previous record set in 2019) with 658, and a 55-percent conversion rate. This season, going into Sunday’s games, there had been 582 attempts with a 52.4 percent success rate. Just five seasons ago, in 2017, there were only 37 successful two-point conversions the entire season. This year, there have already been 62, with a 50.8-percent success rate. It’s clear that coaches throughout the league have begun to think differently about how the game is played.