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Unless you are playing a game in which scoring is done with basketball frequency, maximizing your expected points is not the same as maximizing your chance to win.

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I'm assuming most people here read David Sklansky's article a few months back about going for it on 4th down. The basis of his whole article was that you can calculate your EP(expected points) from any field position, your opponents EP from that same spot in case you fail, and your expected 4th down conversion success rate, and then compute your best play from that. He of course offered the caveat that it doesn't apply in certain situations where you'd want to minimize your variance, but in general it is correct. Now i'm not saying this method of analyzing football decisions is correct just because he says it is, but I do think that carries a lot of weight.

That said, I do think there is merit to your point about scoring frequency. Obviously if you scored a touchdown to tie and simultaneously the entire starting offense for the other team tore their ACLs, you'd definitely want to kick, as the chance of them scoring again has suddenly dropped to near 0. But I think that with moderately frequent scoring, maximizing EP is correct under normal circumstances not near the end of the game. But again, I think this will almost always mean kicking the extra point.