XFL Announces Plan To Radically Change Football's Scoring System, Tweak Other Rules
How far can you change a sport on a fundamental level before the new sport is so much unlike the original that you’ve created something completely new?
The XFL will be testing those boundaries.
The spring league, which starts play in 2020, is introducing another new wrinkle as it seeks to radically alter the sport of American football while putatively (the “F” in XFL) still being the same game as is played in the NCAA and NFL.
Specifically, the league will give teams a better chance to come from behind with more extra point options, XFL Commissioner Oliver Luck told Mike Florio of NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk on Monday.
“We literally have a nine-point touchdown,” Luck said.
One thing the XFL has in common with its seemingly defunct counterpart the Alliance of American Football is its disdain for the point-after-touchdown kick.
The AAF wiped out extra points and required all teams to go for two after every touchdown.
The XFL, according to Luck, is set to offer something more like deciding what size to order on a fast-food combo meal: small, medium or large.
A small would be a play from scrimmage from the 2-yard line, like a standard 2-point conversion; this would be worth one point.
Order a medium and you get the ball at the 5 and two points for converting.
And finally, order a large and you can have the ball at the 10 and get three points for punching the ball in on what is essentially a fourth-and-10.
“We think that’s valuable because teams that historically are down by let’s say three scores, well guess what, if it’s a 16-point or a 17-point differential, you’re really looking at a two-score game theoretically,” Luck said.
Similarly, the XFL is trying out a new overtime format, the 2-point conversion shootout, like penalty kicks in soccer or penalty shots in hockey.
In this format, there are 44 players on the field, as each team puts its offense and defense at different ends.
They will then run five traditional two-point conversions each, and just like penalty shots, the team with the most scores wins.
“Soccer, which is the global game, hockey, which is the cold-weather global game — they’ve figured out how to do overtimes,” Luck said. “They’re compelling.”
Other possible changes he mentioned include a 30-second play clock; a no-fair-catch, 5-yard-halo rule on punt returns; a revised forward pass rule that would encourage double passes; and a re-emphasis on kickoff returns.
Circling back to that new extra-point rule, it creates an interesting statistical decision, albeit one that might need to be tweaked.
In 2018 in the NFL, according to Pro Football Reference’s Play Index, there were 68 2-point conversions on 128 tries, a 53.1 percent success rate. So that’s your baseline for a one-point play in the XFL.
To get a larger sample size, we’ll stretch NFL data back to 2011.
On fourth-and-5, teams went for it 282 times and succeeded 47.2 percent of the time at getting either a first down or a touchdown.
And when teams went for it on fourth-and-10, they converted 99 of 295 attempts, a 33.6 percent clip.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to see the implications; the 3-pointer from the 10 is the “smart” play — depending, of course, on personnel matchups, field conditions and so on.
In theory, it’s interesting football, with no 18-point lead safe: As Luck pointed out, unlike the NFL, where a team would need three scores to close that gap between themselves and their opponent, an XFL team could draw level with two of those “nine-point touchdowns.”
On the other hand, how far away from traditional football can you go and still be playing football?
Luck told Florio the XFL will walk the line.
“We’re looking at a number of different things, but ultimately we want to stick with our notion that the game is certainly familiar — it’s 11 on 11, same field, same number of downs, etc. — but we do want to have some things that really not just are different for difference’s sake, but we think quite honestly are things that fans want to see,” he said.
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