Two-Minute Drill

What is Two-Minute Drill?

In football, a two-minute drill is a late-game push to use limited clock time well. The score, field position and remaining downs determine what a team needs next. A short gain that is useful while protecting a lead can be a poor trade when the offense must travel a long way before time expires.

This independent Little Fun Games edition turns that decision into one short daily challenge. You take over a real fourth-quarter situation from the 2022–2025 NFL seasons and select one of four broad play families. The bank contains 60 situations from 60 different games. Each starts with no more than two minutes remaining and a score margin of eight points or fewer. It is a single-call exercise, not a full drive simulation or the game hosted at nfl2mindrill.com.

How to play today's drive

Read the scoreboard first: your team has the ball, its score is on the left, and the opponent’s score is on the right. The clock shows the time left in the fourth quarter. Below it, check the down, yards needed for a first down, ball position and timeouts. The field graphic marks the ball moving toward the opponent’s end zone; it does not animate the original play.

Choose Run, Pass, RPO or Trick. There is no countdown while choosing, so you can think before submitting. One selection completes the daily challenge. Returning to the page shows the same result rather than allowing another scored attempt. After choosing, compare all four estimates and read what happened in the real game. A successful historical play does not automatically make that play family the highest-graded choice.

Calling a play: your four options

• Run: a ground play not separately labelled RPO or Trick. Think about whether gaining a few yards is worth the clock it may use.
• Pass: a passing play outside those two labelled groups. An incompletion, sack or interception can change its value considerably.
• RPO: a run-pass option identified in FTN’s charting. The offense combines running and passing possibilities in a read-based call.
• Trick: a play marked as a trick play by FTN. These unusual calls are relatively rare, so their estimates deserve particular caution.

The groups are mutually exclusive in this edition: Trick takes priority, then RPO, then the remaining Run and Pass plays. Kneels and spikes are removed. You are choosing a broad family rather than drawing routes or controlling individual players. Kicks, timeouts and formation changes are not playable options in this first version.

How your calls are graded

All estimates are calculated offline. For each situation, we start with its nflfastR pre-snap win probability and add a weighted average of historical win-probability changes (WPA) from 30 comparison plays for each call. Plays from the target game are excluded, so the actual outcome is not reused to grade itself. The result is constrained to the probability range and stored with the game data.

The comparison pool covers the fourth quarter with 1–600 seconds remaining and a score margin of at most 16. We find nearby situations using down, distance, yard line, remaining seconds, score difference, both teams’ timeouts and pre-snap win probability. Closer observations receive more weight. The broader time window is necessary for rare RPO and Trick calls; not all 30 samples are two-minute plays or exact matches.

These are descriptive historical-neighbour estimates, not simulations of the rest of the match and not causal evidence that switching a call would change the outcome by that amount. Personnel, defensive looks, weather and injuries are not represented. All four estimates and sample counts appear after the choice. “Top call” means highest under this model; small differences should not be treated as reliable coaching advice.

Call percentile counts how many of the four options have a lower estimate. With four distinct values, the scores are 0, 25, 50 and 75. The best call outranks three of four options, so it receives 75—not a fabricated claim that you beat 75% of NFL coaches or other players. The historical coach comparison starts with call frequency among 250 nearby plays and widens the group when a rare call has no supported coach match; a coach must have at least five observations in the comparison group.

Your daily score and streak

Everyone using this edition receives the same scheduled situation on the same UTC date. A new challenge opens at 00:00 UTC, which is 08:00 in China. The schedule starts on October 18, 2026 and repeats after 60 days unless a later data release extends it. Challenge numbers continue increasing even when the situation bank cycles.

Completing the daily choice extends your streak if you also completed yesterday’s challenge. Skipping a UTC day breaks the streak. Results and the Survivor personal best are stored on this browser only. Private browsing, blocked storage or clearing site data can prevent persistence. A different device or domain does not automatically receive your progress.

The result has Share and Copy score controls. Your message includes the challenge number, the explicitly labelled call percentile, a historical style match, whether your call matched the original, your daily streak and this page’s address. No answer is posted automatically: choose where to share it yourself.

Survivor mode

Switch to Survivor for an ongoing sequence drawn from the same 60 situations. Choosing the highest estimated option keeps the run alive. Any other choice ends it; you can immediately start another run. You see the full comparison after every choice, then choose Next situation to continue. A run visits each situation at most once, and clearing all 60 completes it.

Survivor is a model-based call challenge, not a simulation of winning entire NFL games. Its correct-call count and personal best remain local; there is no global leaderboard or verified competitive ranking. Practice may reveal a future daily situation, and browser data can be edited, so sharing is for fun rather than proof of competitive skill.

Where the data comes from

Play-by-play situations, coaching names and win-probability fields come from nflverse, whose general data release uses CC BY 4.0. RPO and Trick labels come from FTN Data via nflverse under CC BY-SA 4.0. The FTN data dictionary describes those charted fields.

Little Fun Games joined the datasets, filtered eligible situations, grouped call types, calculated historical-neighbour estimates and created the daily schedule. Our adapted game data is distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0, with source URLs and file hashes included. See the attribution and licence notice. Downloaded source snapshots stay in the offline pipeline; playing does not query an external sports API.

Real team abbreviations, game descriptions and coaching names identify historical games and the comparison data. No team logos are used. This independent game is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the National Football League, its teams, players, coaches, the NFLPA, FTN or nflverse. Names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Want a different kind of challenge? Try Krillion daily trivia, or return to our browser game directory.

Before you play