It’s Time To Talk NFL Overtime
The Bills/Chiefs game, the Patriots/Falcons Super Bowl, and the Patriots/Chiefs AFC Championship Game ended on an anticlimax.
The outcome of the game was preordained by the coin toss: in all cases, if you watched the game, you knew what was going to happen: the team that won the toss was going to win.
Forget “fair” in sports. Sports don’t have to be fair; the ruleset is understood before the game, and you should design your gameplan accordingly. You could require that the road team play with 10 players, and provided that both teams knew the rules in advance, it is still “fair.” The issue isn’t fairness, but predictability. To end such a magnificent game with such a predictable outcome is an utter letdown.
Sure, you can show me the overall overtime stats are not that skewed in favor of the team that wins the toss across a large sample of games. I don’t buy it. The playoffs are different. Two high-quality offenses, after a four-quarter back-and-forth, emotionally draining war of playoff football? There’s just no way a defense is going to hold up against an offense that merely executes competently.
My first idea to solve this problem is what I called “the 3rd quarter of the second half.” The rule is simple: in a game where the score is tied at the end of regulation, play a 5th quarter, but don’t start it with a coin toss. Just flip sides, and have the team that currently has the ball continue matriculating the ball down the field.
This would result in significant changes in strategy for teams in the 4th quarter. Let me give an example: the Bills/Buccaneers game from earlier this season.
In that game, the Bucs were up 27-10, and Buffalo mounted a furious comeback to tie it, culminating in a 25 yard field goal on 4th and 2 from the 7 with 25 seconds remaining in regulation. Buffalo kicked off, Tampa took a knee, and the game went into overtime. Buffalo actually won the toss and went three and out, and then Tom Brady did what Tom Brady does, and won the game.
But in a world with this type of overtime, the decision calculus would change for the Bills on 4th and 2 from the 7 with 25 seconds remaining. Instead of getting a near-guarantee of an overtime coin toss, the Bills would have been facing a Tom Brady led offense getting the ball back with 15 seconds to go… for another drive. Regulation would expire, we’d go to a commercial, and Brady would have the ball on the next drive.
If the Bills wanted to avoid that outcome, they’d go for the touchdown instead of the field goal. In essence, the interests of the teams involved would mean that the trailing team would change its late game strategy to avoid tying the game at the buzzer. (Tying the game at the buzzer would mean that the other team was getting the ball next.)
I think this is a vastly superior system to the present. It takes the coin flip out of the equation entirely and allows the overtime “one possession” problem to be a product of what happened during the game, rather than in a referee’s hand.
Admittedly, this would be a significant change to the endgame in football. I think it would be only for the best. Playing for field goals late is boring; touchdowns are fun.
But if you refused to tinker with the regulation endgame, I have a solution that is actually more responsive to my initial objections about an anticlimax: the “one play to rule them all” option.
What is that? Well, it’s a coin flip. Winner of the flip gets to choose: offense, or defense? But instead of getting a kickoff, they get one play: 4th and 2, from the 2 yard line. If they score, they win. If not, they lose.
Two-point conversions are roughly 50 percent plays (48 percent I think). Moreover, the fatigue issue would be somewhat mitigated: while getting it together for one final drive on defense is an enormous task, stopping just one play should be within the physical capabilities of an exhausted defense. Figure out your best play, call it, and see what happens.
Is this “fair?” No, it’s not. But it’s exciting, it gives both teams a chance, and it’s certainly climactic.
So I waver on these options. But I think they’re both vastly superior to the current hash of a system we have.
My pet reform is for everyone to get the ball at least once and play until someone takes the lead and then stops the other team. So in the real game Buffalo gets the ball down seven. They have to go for a TD. They make it, the game continues. They don’t, it doesn’t.Report
People complained that “Sudden Death” was unfair and they changed it to the current format so that the only way you *won’t* get a chance on offense is by giving up a TD on Defense on the first possession.
This was a reasonable compromise/solution to Sudden Death. Defense is half the game. It’s too bad Josh Allen didn’t get a shot in OT, but dems the breaks.
The only real alternative for true “fairness” is the college OT format, and most people hate that because it more resembles the hockey shoot out or PKs at the end of a soccer match. And in those instances, it’s no longer the game you were playing. It’s a skills competition.Report
Here’s my counterpoint though. The ability to play serious defense has been severely undermined by rule changes over the last 25 or so years. It’s half of the game, but it’s a half that (in some cases for good reason) has been really handicapped.
All that said I’m fine with what they do for the regular season. But for playoffs they should just do an extra regular quarter. It’s not like we see lots of OT playoff games (maybe 1 a year if that?) so it isn’t a huge safety issue. The rules weigh towards games ending in shootouts so finish the damn shoot out.Report
I’d be ok with making playoff OT a full quarter that begins with a Kick off and has a 2-minute warning. If a team keeps possession for almost the entire 15 minutes, so be it.
I like that because it preserves the integrity of the game. The only issue is if it ends in a tie again. Then what? 2pt conversion contest? Field Goal shootout? No thanks.
RE: Regular season OT. I think it was a mistake making the OT 10 minutes. It’s why the NFL has so many ties – which defeats the purpose of OT. 10 minutes only allows for 1 decent possession per team.Report
I’d say if the OT quarter ends in a tie go to 5 minute periods, no additional time outs, until someone wins BUT with no forced change of possession. So the game continues exactly where it is when OT ends (I guess change sides of the field?) like it does between 1st and 2nd and 3rd and 4th quarters. Eventually someone will hold or there will be a pick and easy ability to run out the clock.
As an aside are there really too many ties? I feel like it’s really only 1 or 2 a season but maybe I’m under counting.Report
Your count is right, but it’s not the rarity it once was.
From 1990 through the 2011 season, the NFL had 4 tie games.
Starting in 2012 the instituted “modified sudden death” and in the last 10 years we have had 10 ties.Report
I saw the suggestion that there be a blind auction. Both teams say that they will start at a certain yard line. Furthest wins the ball.
There wasn’t a discussion of what would happen if there were a tie… maybe that’s where we could flip a coin.
Person who wins the toss decides who gets the .5 after their bid.
Then make the bid.
One card says 50 yard line. One card says 55.5 yard line.
55.5 has it. Go.Report
Single bid? Nah, let them reverse auction until the other side says nope, won’t take the ball on my 1.
Thought I’ll confess to being a softy and thinking the College system is more-or-less ok… the game *was* a tie in regulation… we’re just setting up a reciprocal model that’s better than a coin-toss to determine the winner.Report
Get out the podiums (podia?) and let’s play Name That Tune.
Reverse auctions where they’re hissing back and forth at each other like a UFC weigh in?
We could charge Superbowl prices for the ads. We’d see owners institute rules that would make games more likely to result in a tie.Report
Podia, fireworks, dancing sharks and athletes throwing shade with each bid? You say this like I’d back down.Report
It’s a license to print money.Report
Tell me about it.
New idea:
We lock all the coaches in a sound-proof box while the players negotiate… all they can see is the body language…. for fun we let them hold up signs… we watch then furiously scribble: Don’t go below the 10.
Then we let them out and tell them how Neon Deion Sanders has won the bid and where they are starting from.
Also, none of the captains would be eligible to act as negotiator – back benchers and ne’er do wells only.Report
The *SAME* sound-proof box. They can talk to each other.
I prefer the idea of the QBs doing it. They never play against each other. Let’s put them together for a moment that isn’t the limp handshake “good game” moment afterwards.Report
The Quarterbacks? So no dancing sharks either?
But yeah, I suppose that’s where it would inevitably end-up.
Wait, who’s in the box together? Coaches from both teams or the Coaches/Negotiators from same team? I could get behind the former but not the latter – that would just be the coaches negotiating.
Should we patent this or something?Report
All right, you jamokes, that’s enough.Report
I saw something like this had been proposed (maybe on Will’s feed?) but I thought it was the “pie rule” — one team picks the starting yard line, the other decides to take the offense or the defense.Report
The fundamental question is “do you or do you not require that both teams get a shot in OT”, which is really what the discussion is about. Proposals of “well we could do OT like this or we could do it like that” just distract from that question. (I think they should.)
That said…we shouldn’t even be having this discussion. The Bills screwed up their defense play-calling. The game shouldn’t even have gone to OT, because they should have been covering the receivers instead of rushing Mahomes. He clearly wasn’t being pressured enough to mess with his throws, and he had plenty of open receivers who were standing near the sidelines to make a first-down completion and run out of bounds. (Tony Romo pointed it out on the Chiefs’ last drive in regulation.)Report
Agreed.Report
I listened to a podcast featuring a current player and he was pretty adamant that the players themselves don’t care much. He’s been on the Chiefs for several years, so he has been on both ends of the OT rule. Now, football is an entertainment industry so the fan experience matters and I appreciate that this post is not so much focused on “fair” but instead on that fan experience. I don’t agree necessarily but at least I think this is barking up the right tree.
One issue with the “5th quarter” idea is that it removes exciting last-second plays in tied games. If a team can simply retain possession into the 5th quarter of a tied game, we wouldn’t see any last second hail maries or insane FG tries or the like.
I reckon any “solution” would introduce just as many problems as it would solve. Maybe those problems would be better than the “problems” with the current situation, but it would take several years to game out all the different scenarios to be confident that was the case. The NFL has proven itself to be too reactive with regards to rule changes in response to unlikely on-field situations that I’d rather not see that trend continue with OT.Report
Zombie receiver in the end zone.Report
Yes!!!Report