Rich laments that NFL-overtime rules are unfair to the team that loses the coin toss, as the Bills did on Sunday, after which they allowed the Chiefs to score a first-possession touchdown that immediately ended the game. The rules are indeed unfair, but I don’t like Rich’s suggestion to guarantee each team one possession in overtime regardless of the outcome of the first drive.
The problem is the extension of an already long and brutal game. In fact, the equal-possession logic could lead to an interminable, baseball-style approach to overtime. Say the Chiefs–Bills game was extended under Rich’s rule, and the Bills used their guaranteed overtime possession to score a tying touchdown, but the Chiefs came back on their second overtime possession to score game-ending points. How unfair, one might say, that the Chiefs won by virtue of a coin toss that gave them two opportunities to score, while the Bills had only one. If we indulge that way of thinking, then we would end up with an overtime modeled on baseball’s extra-innings system, in which each team gets one possession, and then, if still tied, each team get another possession, and so on. This potentially lengthy process is not appropriate for a sport that requires more than baseball’s light physical activity.
Actually, as Dominic Pino points out, the “extra innings” approach to overtime is already used in college football. The trick is that possessions start very close to the opponent’s end zone in order to save time. I’m not a fan of this method — it’s still time-consuming, the rules are convoluted, and the structure of the game changes too much.
There is a much simpler solution, which is to do away with overtime as a separate period of play. If time expires in the fourth quarter while the game is tied, play should simply continue as normal, except that the next score wins. That’s it. No need for a coin toss or any special back-and-forth rules. If it’s 2nd and 10 on the 44-yard line when time expires in a tie game, then it should remain 2nd and 10 on the 44-yard line. The only difference is that the game clock is turned off, and the game continues only as long as it remains tied. Think of it as extending the fourth quarter rather than halting play so that a coin toss can initiate a kickoff and a whole new period.
Yes, this system still rewards the last team to have the ball rather than guarantee an equal number of possessions, but that’s the way non-overtime games work. The three other games this weekend were all decided by tie-breaking field goals kicked as time expired in regulation. No one complains that those games should have been extended to accommodate another possession for the losing team. There’s no reason to start thinking that way just because the game is still tied when the fourth quarter ends.