How to play
Two-Minute Drill is a daily NFL play-calling game. Every morning you get three real situations from the closing minutes of actual football games. You call the play. Then you find out how much win chance your call was worth.
The situation
Each spot shows what a coach actually saw: the score, the quarter, the clock, your field position, the down and distance, and how many timeouts each team has left. The field diagram puts the line of scrimmage in white and the first-down marker in yellow. That is everything you get before you decide.
The call
Pick one of the plays on offer. Some spots give you more choices than others — a punt or a field goal only makes sense in some situations, so those buttons only appear when a real coach had that option.
How you are graded
Every call is worth a certain amount of win chance in that exact situation. Your grade is the win chance you gave up compared with the best available call.
A green square means you gave up almost nothing. Yellow is a small cost. Orange is expensive. Red is a blown call.
The thresholds are the same ones sharp analysts use for in-game decisions: under half a percentage point of win chance is green, under two points is yellow, under five is orange, and anything above five percentage points of lost win chance is red.
Your score
At the end of the day you get a score from 0 to 100. It answers one question: how did you do against the field? We simulate a few thousand NFL play-callers, each with his own level of judgment — some read the situation sharply, some just call the league-average play. Your score is the share of those callers who gave up more win chance than you did. Sixty means you were better than 60% of them.
The result of the play does not change your grade
This is the part that takes getting used to. A good call that failed is still a good call. The grade looks at what the decision was worth, not what happened next. The completion, the interception, the fifty-yard kick — none of it moves your score. That is deliberate: it is the only way to score a decision honestly.
Also on the card
After you have locked in your calls, the page shows what the real coach actually did, and whether you beat him. That comparison is a story, not a score. Coaches are not always right, which is half the fun.
One puzzle a day
Everyone gets the same three spots on the same day, and the same score, because the puzzle and the grading are fixed to the date. Come back tomorrow for a new one.
Where the data comes from
Every situation is a real play from a real NFL game, taken from nflverse play-by-play data. The value of each call is built from the average win-probability swing of plays of that type in the same kind of situation — same down, same distance, same part of the field, same clock and score. Full credit and licensing details are on the about page.