What is a one point safety?

Answer 1

A one point safety can occur during extra point tries. In College Football, the ball is "live" during extra point kicks and two point conversions. Should the defensive team recover or interecept the ball, and then retreat backwards into their end zone and be tackled, ONE point is awarded to the offensive team. This occured during the Texan-Texas A&M game. A one point safety can occur during a pro game on a block kick attempt. to get a 1 point safety is on a extra point attempt. the kick gets block and the other team recovers it and is out of the endzone then he runs back in his endzone and gets tackled A one point safety is also called if the offense carries the ball out of the endzone, fumbles back into the endzone and then recovers it and cannot advance it back out. This happened in a Tennessee-Florida game a few years back. Though it has never happened, there is one other way in which a one-point safety can be scored in a college football game*, this one by the defensive team. A player on the offensive team must be tackled in his own end zone during a point-after or two-point-conversion attempt. Because that end zone is usually 97 yards away from the original line of scrimmage, you can see why this is an unlikely event. But it is possible. For example, the offensive team, after scoring a touchdown, opts for a point-after kick, but it is blocked, then recovered by an offensive player, who, in attempting to score a 2-point conversion while avoiding being tackled, retreats all the way back to his own end zone, where he is either tackled or steps over the back or side lines of his own end zone.

Another (more likely, albeit complicated) example: the offensive team goes for a 2-point conversion, but the ball is intercepted or fumbled and recovered by a defensive player. The defensive player attempts to run it all the way down the field for a defensive two-point conversion, but fumbles the ball just before reaching the end zone. The rest of what transpires follows the typical rules for scoring a safety, i.e. the loose ball is ultimately either:

(1) recovered just before the goal line by an offensive player who runs it back past the goal line and is downed or steps out of bounds in his own end zone, (2) muffed into the end zone where it is recovered an offensive player who is then downed or steps out of bounds in his own end zone, or (3) muffed by an offensive player past the goal line with the loose ball going out of bounds in the end zone, either to side or out the back of the end zone.

* NFL rules do not allow for a "defensive conversion safety". If either of the above examples occurred in an NFL game, no points would be awarded, and the team that had just scored the touchdown would kick off as usual.