And this, my friends, is where it all starts to get very interesting. If there is a time when the NFL's new PAT rule will turn the game upside down, it's now. And our unscientific but recent indicators tell us it will!

Place-kickers have missed eight extra points in Week 13 for the second consecutive week, a sharp drop from earlier this season. The chart shows that smart and confident teams -- hello, Pittsburgh Steelers -- might want to pivot further away from kicks and more toward two-point conversions as weather and kicker fatigue (perhaps?) impact the percentages.

By coincidence, Sunday gave us two milestones in the NFL's yearlong experiment to energize the play after touchdowns. The New Orleans Saints scooped a blocked extra point and scored the NFL's first two-point return, a few hours after the Baltimore Ravens had a similar play called back on a penalty. Meanwhile, the margin of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ 42-39 loss to the Tennessee Titans can be traced directly to a pair of missed extra points and a failed two-point conversion that attempted to make up for them.

Those results are extreme examples, of course. And let's face it, the new rule had provided few surprises for most of the season before this. We did lose our minds -- irrationally, as it turned out -- when place-kickers missed 14 field goal attempts in Week 4. But to date, the league-wide field goal percentage was 84.8, almost identical to what it was through 13 weeks last season.

And as recently as Week 9, teams missed only one extra point in 64 attempts, and the extra point success rate was 95.1 percent, only slightly lower than what most had predicted. (The league conversion rate on 33-yard field goals in the previous two seasons was 95.6 percent.) But teams missed five PATs in both Week 10 and Week 11, and now we've seen eight in both Week 12 and Week 13.

The assumption has been that worsening weather will pull down the success rate, and that might be true in some cases. Sunday, however, was a mild day throughout the country.

In fact, all 15 games played so far in Week 13 had temperatures higher than 36 degrees at kickoff. Eleven games were played either inside a dome or at outdoor fields where kickoff temperatures were at least 50 degrees. There were only three stadiums with wind gusts of more than 10 miles per hour, according to a review of the official game books, and place-kickers were perfect in those games. Perhaps some kickers' legs are not as fresh or accurate as they were at the start of the season, mirroring a physical decline we see at other positions.

Regardless, it's fair to assume that at least some coaches will try for the two-point conversion more often down the stretch. Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has given his team a head start, attempting 10 already this season. The Steelers converted for a seventh time in Sunday night's 45-10 victory over the Indianapolis Colts, setting a league record, an important development for a team that's employed four different place-kickers since the start of training camp.

To be fair, Tomlin has a healthy Ben Roethlisberger leading an offense that has averaged an NFL-high 34.0 points per game in its past four games. But the percentages will start to tilt more toward the two-point play for everyone, if the extra-point dip is any indication.

We've already seen a big increase in two-point attempts this season. The total of 81 through Sunday night's game puts the league on pace for more than double last season's total of 47. Notably, the conversion rate in the two seasons is exactly the same (47 percent).

So if extra points rates are going to hover around 90 percent, as they have the past two weeks, here's one way to think about the decision-making process: making 100 two-point conversion attempts at a success rate of 47 percent would equal 94 points, but making 100 extra-point attempts at a success rate of 90 percent would equal 90 points.

Individual team characteristics, such as place-kicker talent and offensive proficiency, must be factored in. The same goes for game situations and weather. But from an analytics perspective, the recent decline in extra points now makes the two-point conversion a better play on average, when all other factors are equal.

Will NFL coaches see it the same way through their ultra-conservative lenses? Even if only a few do, we'll still see a final month unlike any other in NFL history. Hang on.