An Intentional Safety to Give Your Opponent a Chance?! Inside the Weirdest Play of the 2020 Season

Up five late against Appalachian State and facing punting issues, Louisiana coach Billy Napier got creative ... very creative. It worked, but was it the right move?

During a timeout, Shawn Clark huddled his Appalachian State defense together to warn players what would happen next.

Their opponent, Louisiana, led by five points at its own 35-yard line with a fourth-and-2 upcoming. In cold temperatures and drizzling rain, the Ragin’ Cajuns’ snapper was having a rough night. Paul Boudreaux had sent three snaps over the head of punter Rhys Byrns. Punting almost certainly wasn’t an option for the Cajuns, Clark told his team.

Instead, he said, they should expect the Cajuns to do one of three options: (1) go for it on fourth down, (2) have their quarterback pooch punt it out of the shotgun or (3) intentionally take a safety.

Of all the options, Door No. 3 was the least likely, Clark thought. After all, with nearly two full minutes left in the game, why give your opponent a free two points to shrink its lead from five points to three and then give them good ball possession on a free kick?

Well, that’s exactly what the Cajuns did.

“It was definitely … different,” Clark said Monday in an interview about the play.

Cajuns quarterback Levi Lewis took the snap from the shotgun and immediately raced the opposite direction, wasting as much time as he could by tiptoeing along the back of the end zone before being forced out of bounds for the safety.

.@RaginCajunsFB took a safety while leading by 5 points in the final minutes vs App State ... and it worked 🤯

Louisiana - 24
App State - 21https://t.co/AesiJHR7Z3

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) December 5, 2020

Louisiana’s lead went from 24–19 to 24–21. App State then returned the Cajuns’ free kick to its own 45-yard line with 1 minute, 33 seconds left and a timeout. The Mountaineers proceeded to march down to the 13-yard line, twice fire incomplete passes into the end zone and then, with one second left on the clock, miss a 30-yard field goal to tie it.

“Me, personally, I wouldn’t have done that [intentional safety], but it worked,” Clark said. “Twenty years of coaching and I haven’t seen that with that much time left. It was a good call, I guess, on his part. It worked.”

In the weirdest year of the modern era of college football, UL’s intentional safety might have been the most weird. Or bizarre. Or confounding. Or, depending on who you talk to, downright silly. Some believe it was completely unnecessary, absurd and wild—altogether nonsensical. Others agree with the call, describing it as UL coach Billy Napier has: the best option given what had unfolded with his snapper earlier in the game.

Either way, the play swept across college football on Friday night. The image was somewhat stunning—a quarterback racing toward his own end zone to cut his opponent’s deficit to a field goal. Sure, teams have in the past executed an intentional safety, but they usually come with much less time left in the game and rarely shrink a lead in such a meaningful way.

The man who made the decision defended it immediately after the game in a virtual news conference with reporters. “I think we made the right decision,” Napier said.

On Monday, he clarified the situation, suggesting he should have had his quarterback prepared to pooch punt. He called it a preparation and game-time decision error.

“Most years we’ve had the ability to quick kick with the QB,” he said. “We didn’t have that ready to execute in the game plan.”

But on Friday night, he explained the more analytical side to the decision.

Even with his snapper’s troubles, he thought about punting it. With a good punt, Napier says, Appalachian State would have gotten ball possession at their own 40- or 45-yard line (which would have been a 25–30 yard net punt).

Then there was the safety option. The post-safety free kick would have given the Mountaineers the ball at a similar position (it did, actually, at the 45). The bonus of the safety: The Cajuns could milk a few more seconds off the clock.

However, the safety option didn’t drain the clock like Napier would have liked. According to a replay of the game, the game clock did not start until at least five seconds after Lewis snapped the ball. Five seconds ran off the clock when, really, 10 seconds were supposed to.

Analytically, Napier’s decision to intentionally take a safety generated a much lower probability of winning the game than the other options, says Ian O’Connor, a data analyst for the sports analytics company EdjSports.

The Cajuns were at an 83% probability of winning before the fourth-down snap. After the intentional safety, they were at 59%.

The only lower probability among the other options, but barely, was failing to achieve a first down with a fourth-down attempt (56.4%). And what if they had punted? An average punt and return (about 35 yards) would have produced a probability of around 72%. Even a poor net punt of 20 yards would have given the Cajuns a 63.3% chance of winning.

There is, of course, a caveat: The analytics don’t take into account the snapper’s previous struggles and the weather.

“The analytics, they didn’t have that in their book,” says one veteran assistant college football coach who defended Napier’s decision.

Despite some backlash on social media, not everyone disagreed with the intentional safety. For instance, ESPN analyst and former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, watching the game live from a hotel room, sent a text to his friends as the Cajuns began their final series. Knowing the snapping issues, McElroy messaged his friends that he’d run the ball three times and then take a safety.

“They’re like, ‘You’re crazy,’” McElroy says. “I don’t trust them to make a field goal. You have to snap and hold in the weather. And the last thing I would have done would be to punt it.”

McElroy and others believe the Cajuns erred on third down—not fourth. On third-and-2 Lewis rolled out on a bootleg to pass. His options covered, he threw out of bounds, stopping the clock and allowing Appalachian State to save its final timeout. Napier says UL should have had Lewis prepared to slide in bounds instead of throwing incomplete.

“That was bad coaching,” he said Monday.

Some in the college football world believe the Cajuns should have opened Door No. 1: attempting the fourth down.

“With Lewis, I think you run some sort of read [rushing] play,” says one analyst who used to play the game.

A fourth-down attempt is heavy risk-reward. Get it, O’Connor says, and you have a more than 99% chance of winning the game. Fail and your chances diminish to a similar mark as the safety (remember the percentages: 59% after the safety and 56.4% after a fourth-down failure).

That is why, statistically, the decision was “suboptimal,” says O’Connor. If you take the safety, you might as well have attempted the fourth down. The percentages are almost the same.

“If it was a six-point game down to a four-point game, it would be a different situation,” O’Connor says.

Suboptimal or not, in the end, the Cajuns notched a victory and the college football world got to see maybe the weirdest play in this weird season.

Says another college football assistant who watched the game: “They won. And that’s all that matters!”