The NFL has spent 106 years producing just about every kind of scoring oddity you can imagine. There’s one that still hasn’t shown up on a league scoreboard: the one-point safety.
That sounds strange because safeties are normally worth two points. But the rulebook has a narrow path to one point, and it only exists on a try.
The league didn’t even make that possible until the two-point conversion arrived in 1994, and for the first 20 seasons after that, only the offense could score on the play. If a team tried a two-point conversion, it was either good for two or dead.
No defense, no weird counterpunch, no one-point safety.
That changed in 2015, when the NFL gave the defense a chance to score on a two-point attempt. Interceptions and fumble returns could now go the other way for two, and with that update came the door to the one-point safety. The rulebook puts it plainly: "If the Try results in what would ordinarily be a safety against either team, one point is awarded to the opponent," the rulebook states.
And yet, even after 11 seasons with that rule in place, the one-point safety still hasn’t happened in the NFL.
It came awfully close in September, during the Bills-Ravens Week 1 game. Baltimore’s Kyle Hamilton intercepted Josh Allen in the end zone on a two-point play.
If Hamilton had simply gone down, the play would have ended there. Instead, he advanced the ball about two feet out of the end zone and flipped it back to Kyle Van Noy, who was still in the end zone.
At that point, if Buffalo had brought Van Noy down, the Bills would have been awarded a one-point safety. Van Noy avoided that outcome by getting out of the end zone and all the way to the one-yard line before taking a knee.
If he had kneeled in the end zone, Buffalo would have gotten the point.
There are a few different ways this bizarre score can happen, but they all involve the same basic nightmare: a turnover near the goal line followed by the player with the ball ending up tackled in his own end zone. A pick at the one-yard line that gets returned backward into the end zone and stopped there would do it. So would a fumble return that turns into a scramble the wrong way.
And, in theory, the defense can also be the team that scores the one point. The source material lays out a chain of events where Hamilton returns the interception 95 yards to the Bills’ 5-yard line, a Bills defender punches the ball out and recovers it at the 1-yard line, then that defender backs into the end zone while trying to escape Baltimore tacklers, only to be tackled there. In that case, the Ravens would get the one-point safety.
That kind of score has never happened in the NFL, and it’s even more unlikely than the offense getting tagged for one.
College football has at least seen it twice at the FBS level. Brad Nessler was on the call for both of those games, and CBS Sports HQ producer Dan Weiner was in the building for both as well.
The first came in 2004 in Texas-Texas A&M. The most famous came nine years later, when Oregon scored a one-point safety against Kansas State in the 2013 Fiesta Bowl.
That Oregon play followed a blocked extra point, with Kansas State recovering the ball in the field of play before a player retreated into his own end zone. In the NFL, that kind of thing is theoretically possible on a blocked extra point too, though the source notes it’s highly improbable because the line of scrimmage on an NFL extra point is the 15-yard line.
So if the NFL ever finally gets its first one-point safety, the likeliest path is the same strange road the league nearly traveled in Bills-Ravens: a turnover, a desperate return, and a tackle in the end zone that turns one of the sport’s rarest scoring plays into reality.
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