Columnist Dean Juipe: Why not go for two after every TD?

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2000 | 1:30 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

A touchdown is scored and the kicker comes out and adds the extra point. It's all so perfunctory we take it for granted.

But given what happened to the St. Louis Rams Sunday and the UNLV Rebels the night before, football coaches ought to give serious thought to reevaluating their positions on extra points and, perhaps, veer from the previously accepted mainstream.

The Rams, who lost place kicker Jeff Wilkins to a knee injury in the first quarter of their game with Atlanta, improvised thereafter. Of the five touchdowns they scored (en route to a 45-29 victory) after Wilkins went down, the Rams went for two-point conversions each time and successfully converted four.

Wilkins was 1-for-1 on extra points before getting hurt.

So instead of the six points the Rams would have compiled in the game had Wilkins remained healthy and completed each extra-point try, they finished with nine points on one one-point conversion and four two-point conversions. They took a negative and turned it into a positive.

The Rebels and head coach John Robinson may want to emulate the professional world champions and bypass the traditional extra-point approach. Without being too hard on kicker Ray Cheetany, who is, after all, merely a college student and not a pro, he doesn't seem to be getting the job done on extra points and two such failures cost UNLV a game it otherwise would have won at Colorado State.

Why not routinely go for two points on each conversion attempt from here on out?

Along those same lines, why not eschew field-goal tries -- although Cheetany is 5 for 7 -- and either go for the first down or punt in situations that customarily call for a field-goal attempt?

Considering the fact Colorado State admitted to putting a special emphasis on blocking Cheetany's kicks after scouting the Rebels, eliminating the kicking unit per se may not be that crazy of an idea.

Cheetany habitually kicks the ball low and is only 13-for-18 in extra-point tries, with one miss and one block at CSU contributing directly to a heartbreaking 20-19 loss. He came to UNLV to punt, not kick per se, and the only other kickers at Robinson's disposal are untested freshmen, Dillon Pieffer and Rob Williams.

Last year's kicker at UNLV, Tim O'Reilly, was no whiz on extra points either and finished the season only 16 of 21.

The Rebels need to do something different while waiting on Pieffer and/or Williams to develop, so why not contribute to revolutionizing the sport? Why not always go for two?

What's to say it won't become a widespread trend? What's to say scores like 6-6, 8-8 or 8-6 won't become more prevalent than the typical 7-7 score that accompanies the usual one touchdown and one extra point for each team early in a game?

Fans would like it. TV executives would love it.

A rudimentary task, kicking an extra point, would be replaced by risky plays that offer appropriate returns. It would give the staid sport more life, more challenges.

Taken a step further, perhaps the NFL and NCAA should mandate the change and outlaw the single extra point. Perhaps they should do it before the upstart Xtreme Football League stumbles onto the same idea.