The Buffalo Bills‘ stunning comeback win over the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday night featured a lot of wild moments, and at one point, the game got so crazy that it almost gave us the rarest play in the NFL: The one-point safety, which has never happened before in NFL history. 

The only way a team can score a one-point safety is by recording a safety against their opponent on a two-point conversion and the Ravens came 1 yard from having that happen to them during the fourth quarter of the Bills’ 41-40 win. 

With 12:51 left to play in the game, Josh Allen scored on a 2-yard run to cut Baltimore’s lead down to 35-26. With the Bills trailing by nine, coach Sean McDermott decided to go for two to try and cut the lead down to seven. On the two-point conversion, Allen got picked off by Kyle Hamilton and that’s when things got a little crazy. 

Hamilton was in the end zone when he caught the ball and if he would have simply fallen down, the play would have been over, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Hamilton took a step out of the end zone before pitching the ball to Kyle Van Noy, WHO WAS IN THE END ZONE. If the Bills had tackled Van Noy in the end zone, Buffalo would have gotten the rare one-point safety. However, Van Noy made a VERY heads up play by going out to the 1-yard line before kneeling. If Van Noy had kneeled the ball in the end zone, the Bills also would have been awarded a one-point safety. 

Let’s take a look at the play. 

Hamilton’s bizarre decision-making almost gave us the first one-point safety in NFL history and Ravens coach John Harbaugh definitely was NOT pleased with his star defensive back. 

“I thought that was one of the most foolish things I’ve ever seen,” Harbaugh said Monday, via The Athletic. “He agreed and it should never happen again.”

The play was so bad that Harbaugh jokingly started wondering about Hamilton’s education. 

“I just questioned whether he actually graduated Notre Dame or not,” Harbaugh said. 

One reason there has never been a one-point safety in the NFL is because they weren’t even possible for most of the league’s 106-year existence. The two-point conversion was implemented by the NFL in 1994, but for the first 20 seasons of the rule, the only team that could score on a two-point attempt was the offense: Teams either scored two points or they didn’t. In 2015, the NFL approved a rule that gave the defense the ability to score on a two-point conversion. Under the new rule, the defense could now return an interception or a fumble for two points, and when that rule was added, it also opened the door for the one-point safety. 

The Ravens-Bills game is one of the rare instances where we’ve even come close to getting a one-point safety in the NFL. Although there haven’t been any one-pointers in the NFL, there have been two in college at the FBS level. The first one came in a 2004 game between Texas and Texas A&M. The most famous one then came nine years later when Oregon scored a one-point safety against Kansas State in the 2013 Fiesta Bowl. 

In the Fiesta Bowl, the one-point safety came after a blocked a kick. 

The wild part is that the DEFENSE could also potentially score a one-point safety. Here’s how that could have happened in the Ravens-Bills game:

  • 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
  • The Bills defender, looking to evade several Baltimore tacklers, runs backward into the end zone with the football 
  • The Bills defender then gets tackled in the end zone with the football, which would give the Ravens one point

So both the offense and defense can theoretically score a one-point safety although we’ve never seen the defense get score one at any level.