2 Minute Drill Scoring, Explained
You are not graded on whether the play worked. You are graded on whether the call was right — measured in win chance. This is the single most important thing to understand about the game.
Win chance
Win chance is how likely your team is to win the game from where it stands right now: score, time left, who has the ball, down and distance, field position, timeouts. A play near your own goal line with 20 seconds left is worth far less than the same play at midfield, and the game knows it.
When you pick a call, the game works out the win chance of every option you had and compares your choice with the best of them. What actually happened on the snap does not change that comparison.
The four grades
Your call is compared with the best option that was available to you. The gap is measured in win-chance points — a percentage-point difference:
| Grade | Meaning | Gap from the best call |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ green | Good | The best call, or within half a point of it |
| ≈ yellow | Close | Within 2 points |
| ! orange | Costly | Within 5 points |
| ✗ red | A big miss | More than 5 points worse than the best call |
Because green covers everything within half a point of the best, there is usually more than one correct answer. You do not have to find the single perfect play — you have to stay inside the good ones and avoid the ones that quietly throw away win chance.
Win-probability added
Each grade comes with a number: how much that call moved your team’s win chance, in percentage points. A positive number means the situation got better for you; a negative one means it got worse.
- The swing is about the decision, not the result. A designed deep shot that falls incomplete can still be worth nothing, while a safe run on 3rd & 12 that gains four yards can cost real win chance.
- Taken across the drive, these swings add up. At the end you see the total — how you did against a reference play-caller in the same spots.
Your day: the percentile
When the drive ends, your calls get a percentile against play-calling, not against raw results. It is the share of a large set of reference NFL-style play-callers whose calls in the same spots would have cost more win chance than yours. Those callers read the situation with varying skill, so scores spread across the range and a typical showing lands near the middle.
You also get two things to argue about with friends:
- Your rank among everyone who played that day — since everyone gets the same drive.
- The head coach your calls look most like — built from how often you throw, how often you go deep, how often you go for it on fourth down and how often you go for two.
What the grades are not
They are estimates from simulation, not certainties. A model cannot know what a real coach knows on the sideline — an injury, a matchup seen on film, the weather turning. And each snap draws one outcome from many possibilities, so the same call can work one day and fail the next, exactly as it does in real games.
Read a red grade as “this was a bad idea from here”, not as “this lost the game”. Then read the strategy guide to see which bad ideas come up most often.