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There’s less than a minute to go in the fourth quarter and your football team is trailing by six points. Their only shot at a win is to keep possession of the ball for the remaining seconds. The coach calls for an onside kick. The play itself is simple: the team lines up ready to kick the ball but the kicker half aborts, ensuring the ball won’t go far. Once the ball travels at least ten yards, the team is allowed to recover it and take possession—if they can. Most football fans consider this play a long shot, yet it is far more successful than they think.

According to Pat Kirwan, senior analyst at NFL.com, between 2001 and 2008, NFL teams averaged 60 onside kicks a year and succeeded about 1 in 4.76 times. The 2007 NFL season boasted an even higher success rate. Of the 77 onside kicks attempted that season, 22 were recovered by the kicking team, a success rate of 1 in 3.5 times. Those odds may soon begin to change. A new rule in 2009 limits the number of players who can bunch together to try to recover the kick, which will likely affect onside kick success rates.

Teams fare best when they run the play in the third quarter. The odds an onside kick in the third quarter of an NFL game will be successful are 1 in 1.63, or 61% of the time.

In some rare cases, coaches have called for the onside kick to start a game—probably because that’s when the play is most likely to catch the opposing team off guard. The odds of being successful in this situation are a propitious 1 in 2. Since becoming coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, Andy Reid has had exactly that rate of success when calling for onside kicks to open games. The first time he tried it was in 2000 against the Colts. It was Reid’s first game as the Eagles’ coach and it worked; the Eagles won. When he attempted it again three years later he wasn’t as lucky; the Cowboys’ Randal Williams returned the kick and Dallas went on to win.

Of course, a successful onside kick doesn’t always result in victory. In Super Bowl XXX, which was played in 1996 in Tempe, Arizona, Pittsburgh Steelers’ coach Bill Cowher called for the onside kick early in the fourth quarter. With 11:20 left in the game and the Steelers down 20-10, Cowher caught the Cowboys unaware. The play was a success and the Steelers went on to score. In the end, they failed to catch the Cowboys, however, and lost the game.

The Cowboys may have been surprised the play was used during a Super Bowl, but the Steelers had been fully ready to execute it on the grand stage. Cowher was quoted in the New York Times after the game: "It was something that we saw on film…and we practiced it all week. It was just a matter of having the guts to call it. We called it and it worked."