http://mmqb.si.com/2015/07/09/rich-...tee-extra-point-pat-rule-change-the-mmqb-100/
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No. 10: Rich McKay
It had been more than a century since there was a major alteration to football’s scoring system. So when Rich McKay and the Competition Committee convinced the owners to change the extra point, it was no small feat. Nor was it an easy process
By Peter King
Editor’s note: This is part of our summer series, The MMQB 100, counting down the most influential people for the 2015 season.
The story about the 10th-most influential person of the 2015 NFL season is not altogether a story about NFL Competition Committee Co-Chairman Rich McKay. After all, it’s likely that anyone who has clicked onto this story has already said: “Rich McKay? No. 10? The MMQB has lost its mind.”
Well, that last sentence might be fair. But McKay is No. 10 because he represents the biggest change to football’s scoring system in the last 103 years. (In 1912, eight years before the birth of professional football in the United States, the touchdown was changed from five to six points, a two-point safety was added, and the field goal and point-after-touchdown were retained at three and one points, respectively.)
McKay is the president and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons, but he’s on this list because of his role as the czar of the Competition Committee, the rules-making body that status-quo seekers have been seething about in recent years—this year, especially—because of the tinkering they’ve done. In recent years, the committee has recommended, and gotten approval for, changes to overtime and the kickoff (moving it up to decrease the number of kick returns).
This offseason, they made the extra point a slightly more challenging kick. League owners, cognizant of the 99.5% success rate on PATs over the past four seasons, voted 30-2 in May to move the extra point line of scrimmage from the two- to the 15-yard line. That will make the extra point a 32- or 33-yard kick (less of a gimme, but not much less). That will also, league officials hope, spur more two-point-conversion tries. Last season, there were only 59 of those.
Now, this spring McKay was suspended from the Competition Committee because the Falcons were found to have pumped in artificial crowd noise during home games. As the club CEO, McKay wasn’t found to have any role in the crowd-noise issue, but commissioner Roger Goodell suspended him because he was the club executive in charge of such things.
It was a misleading suspension, seeing that McKay was still allowed to lobby teams on Competition Committee business; he just had to do it strictly as a Falcons executive. And with some explicatory and gentle arm-twisting by McKay and others on the committee, there was enough movement by teams that had, for years, not supported the change to the PAT.
The passage of this scoring rule (thanks to McKay’s mastery of the glacial movement of NFL rules reform) is why McKay is on this list. (If there was any evidence McKay was involved in the crowd-noise funny business, The MMQB would not have put him on this list.)
This is a nod to McKay’s influence in the rules-making process. This installment is going to be less about one man than it is about the way a rule change so many in the league, particularly coaches, did not want to see came about. How can a man who is not even on the Falcons’ football-operations side—McKay’s charge from Atlanta owner Arthur Blank these days is to oversee the sale and the construction of the team’s new open-air stadium in Atlanta—be so influential in the making of the rules of the game?
It’s because he’s a deft politician. And because he’s not afraid to push to change a rule, even if that rule is 103 years old.
Amending a rule in a right-wing league like the NFL takes time. Patience and time. When McKay took over as the co-chair of the committee from the late George Young in 1998, Young told McKay not to try to force change. It just wouldn’t work. First, coaches don’t like to be told what to do, or what rules to change, by executives. A couple of years ago, then-Jets coach Rex Ryan was adamant that he didn’t want to change the overtime rules.
While most of his peers eventually changed because the coin flip was weighing too heavily on the outcome of games (nearly six in 10 overtime games in the 10 years prior to the change were won on the first possession), Ryan didn’t. So the committee had to find coaches and owners willing to change. In 2012, “modified overtime” became the rule for all games (it was a postseason-only rule the previous two seasons), with each team getting at least one offensive possession if the first possession didn’t end in a touchdown or safety.
The process to change overtime took four years. McKay was not surprised. Young told him long ago:
Be patient. Listen. Don’t be afraid of change, but don’t force anyone to adopt your way of thinking. Let things marinate if you have to.
There’s no better example of letting things marinate than the extra-point debate. It took nine years of Competition Committee jousting to change it.
* * *
It was in 2006 that committee member Mike Brown, the Bengals’ owner, suggested the league do away with the automatic PAT and simply make a touchdown worth seven points. Brown, normally in the right-wing corner, did have a bit of his father’s (Paul Brown) imagination. But rules changes take 24
yes votes from the league’s 32 owners to pass, and there was nothing close to that for several years after Brown’s idea surfaced.
But with NFL kickers as accurate as Army Ranger sharpshooters, the move toward a PAT change began to gain momentum. For the last two or three years, Goodell has pushed it. The committee thought there was a chance in 2014, when the argument was advanced that, over the previous three seasons, one PAT was missed every 44
games. In the league meeting that year, owners, meeting with the Competition Committee, were asked, “Does anyone here think the extra point is a competitive play?” Not a single owner or owner’s representative said it was. That was a turning point.
This year, though, the Competition Committee came to the league meetings in Arizona thinking it couldn’t advance a proposal to get 24 votes. That’s when Goodell, on the Sunday night before the meetings began, told the eight members of the committee, in effect:
We’ve talked about this for years. You know we can’t have a play that’s strictly ceremonial. You’ve got to figure out the best alternative to make the play mean something.
McKay knew that pushing the extra point back 13 yards wouldn’t be revolutionary. Kickers made 95% of their field-goal tries from 32- and 33-yards out over the past two seasons. He also knew owners and coaches wouldn’t stand for the dissolution of the extra point. And by pushing it back to where it would be a real challenge—say, line of scrimmage at the 27-yard line—the football establishment would have rebelled and no rule change would have had a chance.
So, quietly, McKay pushed for a one-year trial. He knew that would soften the issue for those who weren’t in favor of changing anything about the scoring system. But he also knew that it would make it possible in 2016 (or 2017, after another one-year passage in 2016) to push the line back another five yards. Or 10. The reality is, the league would like to see two years of data before making another change in where the PAT is kicked from. But if the PAT succeeds at a 98% rate in 2015 with no major increase in two-point tries, it’s not impossible that the line could get pushed back in 2016 (with the approval of 24 teams, of course).
That’s the key. Years of experience have taught McKay that fine-turning the PAT a little bit at a time is what is needed.
What’s interesting about the resolution of this case, which could well have been controversial, is that it was not controversial. When the measure came up for debate at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco in May, it was discussed for about a half hour. Owners knew they’d make a change going into the meeting. They just didn’t know how big a change they’d make. The Eagles wanted the two-point play to be snapped from the one-yard line instead of the two-; that was a non-starter because of the risk of injury to quarterbacks getting whacked by big linebackers on sneaks.
The Patriots wanted to make it a permanent rule, with no chance for defensive points to be scored on failed PAT or two-point tries. But the owners liked the idea of the excitement of the defensive return (similar to the college rule) for points, and liked the two-point try to be from two yards out.
The reason there was little debate is that the Competition Committee didn’t try to shove the rule down the league’s throat. Goodell favored it and was forceful about it, but let the committee do its job. That’s the way a democratic process should work, McKay knows, with some marination.
Two final points that McKay knew would be attractive to fans, and to some teams:
• There’s something good about more strategy in the game. Once foul weather comes into play in some stadiums, and the wind is howling or the snow is coming down, coaches are going to have some decisions to make. Let’s say it’s Week 17 at Lambeau Field, Jan. 2. A 23-mph wind blows across the field, and Vikings coach Mike Zimmer has to make a call after a fourth-quarter touchdown brings his team to within 28-20. Send Blair Walsh out to try a 33-yard PAT through the wind? Or spread the field with four wides and Adrian Peterson set behind Teddy Bridgewater and go for two? Now the coach has a decision to make—and there’s more intrigue in the game.
• Rosters could have some intrigue too. Baltimore coach John Harbaugh is likely to have the moderately athletic Joe Flacco and a statue, Matt Schaub, as his quarterbacks. Tom Coughlin could keep two pocket passers, Eli Manning and Ryan Nassib. Would the Ravens or Giants be tempted to keep a third quarterback and 53rd man on the roster to be either the permanent or occasional two-point-conversion pilot? Will any team do that?
I asked one coach who hates the new rule—he doesn’t like to have another decision to make, particularly one that might cost him a game—and he said that as much as he doesn’t want this rule to impact his roster, he’d consider keeping a mobile third quarterback if his first two were not movement players.
So Rich McKay and his committee have given coaches, GMs and fans something to think about, and he did it by changing a rule that many of us never thought would change. That’s why he cracked our top 10.
