One More Thing About Those Two-Point Conversion Tries…

I’ve tried my best to move on from Sunday night’s loss to the Bills. What’s done is done, and nothing can change the outcome. Spending any more time agonizing over the game is pointless; the best thing to do now is to focus on what the Ravens can do in the offseason to get back to this point next year.

But still…

Something about this game kept eating at me. The way the Ravens went about their two-point conversion attempts bothered me at the time and it still bugs me now. While watching each try, my mind was screaming, GIVE THE BALL TO HENRY! There’s no one I trust more to pick up two yards than the bulldozing 6’3”, 247-pound running back. But, alas, the King didn’t touch the ball on either of those two-point plays.

At first, I gave Todd Monken and John Harbaugh the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were seeing something I wasn’t. After all, they are professionals at the height of their careers and I’m a freshman in college. Perhaps passing gave the Ravens the highest possibility of success on those two plays, and that’s why they opted to go that route.

I let that roll around in my mind for a while. But it still wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

So, I did some digging.

I opened my laptop and hammered out a few lines of code—nothing crazy, but just enough to give me the information I wanted. The results surprised me… and they make the decision to throw twice even more perplexing.

Since Lamar Jackson took over as the full-time starter in 2019, the Ravens have attempted 25 two-point conversions (regular and postseason). On those plays, they’ve called 16 passes to just nine runs. But running the ball has been wildly more successful than throwing it; the team scored on 66.7% of its rushing attempts to just 31.2% of its passing tries. Narrowing the sample size to 2024, Baltimore tried three two-point conversions ahead of the Buffalo game: one rushing and two passing. The run was actually the first attempt of the year, and it worked. The subsequent two were all done through the air, and each one of them failed. Adding in their attempts against the Bills, the Ravens went 1-for-5 on two-point tries: one run, four passes. Every single pass play failed. You would think that, after the third our fourth failure through the air, Monken would go back to the run game… but he didn’t.

A closer look at the numbers will tell you that, since 2019, Baltimore has been among the league’s best running the ball in these situations and among the worst in passing.

And, if you look at how the Bills have defended two-point plays over the last two years, you’ll see that teams experience close to average results running the ball against Buffalo but find it nearly impossible to score through the air.

Buffalo’s opponents succeed at a 16.7% clip through the air on two point tries. 16.7! That’s just about as “lockdown” as you can get in the National Football League.

Sometimes, the idea of analytics to heavily influence decision-making is controversial in league circles. But, as one of the most analytically-inclined teams in the NFL, the Ravens really should’ve taken a harder look at the numbers before deciding to throw it twice. With this data in mind, it’s no wonder that they failed on both attempts. Running the ball on two-point plays against the Bills is essentially a coin-flip, but your odds of success increase dramatically when you have the most powerful running back in football in the backfield.

If Monken had simply called two Henry handoffs, I think that we’re having much different conversations this week. Heck, it might’ve been the difference between and trip to Kansas City versus a flight to Cancun.

But, what happened, happened. At least we know what the team should’ve done.

All data was sourced from nflverse, an R package.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2025/01/23/street-talk/two-point-fails-buffalo/