The NFL felt that extra points after touchdowns had become kind of boring. After scoring a touchdown, there is a kick from the two yard line worth one point which was pretty much always successful. During the 2013 seasons it was been successful 99.6% of the time. In 2014 it was successful 99.3% of the time. Not a sure thing, but pretty close.
Teams also had the option of going for two points by running or passing it in. That is harder to do, so, despite the lure of two points teams didn't usually opt for it unless it was near the end of the game and a team really needed those points.
To spice things up they decided to keep the two point option just as it was, but the kick had to made from the fifteen rather than the two yard line. Now that the seasons is over, we can look at how it turned out and what a team might strategically decide to do next year.
Starting from 2013 to the present season, since there were no changes, we would expect the two-points to stay about the same.
2013 - 33 for 69 - 47.8%
2014 - 28 for 59 - 47.4%
2015 - 45 for 94 - 47.8%
(I couldn't find a source that gave the stats for the entire league, so I had to add the team totals. I double checked, so I believe I'm correct on these numbers.)
While we would expect the success rate to stay about the same, it is kind of amazing to me that the percentages came out so close. We do see an increase in the number of tries last year, which is probably due to that fact that the one-point tries are not as automatic as they used to be.
One-point conversion success did go down this year, but not a lot.
2013 - 99.6%
2014 - 99.3%
2014 - 94.2%
So now, a question might be, "Should we just go for two every time now?" That boils down to what is our expected value for the various attempts.
2013 - One Point Attempts - 0.996x1 = 0.996. Two Points Attempts - 0.478x2 = 0.956. Kick it.
2014 - One Point Attempts - 0.993x1 = 0.993. Two Points Attempts - 0.474x2 = 0.948. Kick it.
2015 - One Point Attempts - 0.942x1 = 0.942. Two Points Attempts - 0.478x2 = 0.956. Go for two.
