USA TODAY sports
In 2010, after the Saints secured a Super Bowl berth with a first-drive walk-off-field goal by beating the Vikings in overtime, NFL owners knew overtime was broken. So they fixed it. Partially.
Developed by the sport’s officials, the half-measure prevented an opening drive-field goal from being won, but preserved the ability of the team receiving the Extra session’s opening kickoff to prevail by touchdown.
While no different approach is needed for the regular season (the original sudden-death approach is fine for the 272 non-postseason games), the evidence supporting ending a 12-year job is in the pudding. And the pudding is currently smeared all over the sign.
Of course, the current overtime procedure puts too much emphasis on winning the coin toss. That truth becomes even truer in the playoffs, when the best quarterbacks make the best attacks in the best games. With a score of 6-6, how many playoff games will go into overtime? If, instead, the team that wins the heads-or-tails guessing game gets the ball first in overtime, the final score is 42-36, 37-31, 34-28.
The most exciting games of the year are being short-circuited by a rule that fails to recognize the fact that the rules have shifted toward NFL offenses over time and the reality, as noted above, that the teams qualifying for the playoffs qualify, quarterbacks are pretty good and offenses are pretty good.
Just play defense.
That’s the only counter anyone can come up with. And it’s right when the rules require both teams to play defense. Under the current rule, a team must play defense. The other team doesn’t even have to try if their offense keeps scoring like they’ve been doing all game.
Also, the fact that the Bengals beat the Chiefs in the second overtime of the 2021 AFC Championship and the Rams beat the Saints in the second overtime of the 2018 NFC Championship doesn’t make the rule fair. These are just two relatively rare examples of a team breaking this inherently unfair rule.
The Competitions Committee seems to walk the path of change slowly, as the Competitions Committee often does. Aside from an unreasonable fear of potential and undefined “unintended consequences” (which is another way of acknowledging an inability to proactively envision those consequences), some teams can be swayed by the simple fact that any rule that messes up a team helping another – and that their team could be the next to benefit from the unfair rule.
Look at the Chiefs. They were burned by the first-drive touchdown rule in the 2018 playoffs. That’s why they made progress this year. Next year, the Bills might win the coin toss and score a go-home touchdown on the opening drive of postseason overtime.
Then there are the packers. They’ve been screwed by the first-drive touchdown rule in overtime twice in consecutive years. It would be easy to argue that the next time it happens they have to make their way. So why, the Packers might ask, should we scrap a rule that can help us before it gets a chance?
While resisting a much-needed change will definitely benefit those teams that ultimately end up on the right side of a bad rule going forward, the current rule is not good for the game. The current regulation is not good for the fans. It pulls the plug early on exciting games, with the prevailing feeling that the game shouldn’t be over and that maybe the best team didn’t win.
Although (as explained in Playmakers) I’d rather see the two-point conversion shootout that the USFL will use when it debuts next month, the NFL doesn’t want gimmicks. It wants to keep playing football. The simplest solution is to stare everyone in the face. Guarantee possession for the team starting overtime, then turn the game into a sudden death if the game ties after each team has had the ball once.
Owners, turn the clock back nine weeks. Think about how the Bills and Chiefs hit touchdown after touchdown late in their divisional round game. Whoever won the coin toss in overtime would drive the length of the field and score a touchdown. Why shouldn’t Buffalo have had the chance to do what Kansas City did?
Under the rule as it should be revised, the looming reality of sudden death starting at the third drive would have set the stage for the Bills to potentially choose between a win-or-lose two-point try or risking a kickoff for the Chiefs would have to choose if even a field goal would have won the game. The NFL loves drama on the field, and it’s hard to imagine anything more dramatic.
More importantly, it’s fair. And it finishes the job the owners started 12 years ago when they knew it wasn’t fair to let a team win a playoff game with a first-drive field goal in overtime. (Later that year, the rule was applied to the regular season, although there really wasn’t a need to.) The owners need to realize they didn’t go far enough in 2010, and they need to see the good of the game and its fans via the simple reality that this unfair rule will always help as many teams as it hurts – and that it might help her team as soon as this year.