NFL

Yes, I was very bored when I decided to look this up on Pro Football Reference's play finder.

The exact parameters I used were: years 2002-2022, regular season only, 40 seconds or less in the 4th quarter, play type field goal, everything else set to default.

I looked at the number of field goal plays run when the scoring margin was exactly -1, and there were 89 such plays. I then looked at how many of those plays resulted in a score, and there were 64 such plays. This results in a success rate of 71.9%.

I did the exact same thing for a scoring margin of -2, but this time, kickers only made 35 out of 58 attempts, for a percentage of 60.3%.

Why is this? Could there be some kind of psychological effect where a kicker feels less nervous if they're only down by 1 and trying to go up by 2, than if they're down by 2 and trying to go up by only 1 (even though it's the exact same game situation)? I could stratify my results by remaining time or field goal distance or some other factor, but surely the sample size is large enough to account for these variables, right?

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the success rate in tie games (where a field goal wins instead of sending the game to overtime) and in situations where the offense is down by 3 (where a field goal sends the game to overtime instead of losing). For those, I got 196/269 (72.9%) and 107/150 (71.3%) respectively, so it seems like it's the "down by 2" situation that's the outlier.

Thoughts?