reimagining overtime: a proposal
so, despite the fact that the NFL rule change is so much hot air, the one thing it does accomplish is that it reopens the debate on how overtime should be handled. there seems to be general consensus that pure sudden death is stupid and broken. the college OT system—equal possessions from the 25—is better, but has never seemed perfect to me. here are my primary gripes with it:
- the 25 is too close. starting every possession in field goal range encourages conservative play. the only way to not have a legitimate shot at 3 points is to take a long sack or two short sacks/TFLs (out of 3 plays!), or to give up a turnover. lots of overtime games turn into field goal penalty shootouts.
- no special teams. overtime strictly pits offense versus defense. got a great punter? return man? too bad, they're sitting on the bench.
- no game clock. college overtime is nearly 15 years old, and every time i see a score bug sans game clock, it still weirds me out. this makes overtime play slow and deliberate. the NFL's sudden death OT suffers from the same problem, with the philosophy "pretend it's the 1st quarter again".
anyhow, those are just some ideas that i've been kicking around for a while, and think could work well and make for pretty compelling OT football. would you want to see them implemented in the NFL? the NCAA? i'm interested to hear comments.
March 28th, 2010 at 11:47 AM ^
Overall, the team that correctly called the coin toss won overtime games 59.8 percent of the time in the last 15 years, or since kickoffs were moved back 5 yards to the 30.
Unless you're Marty Mornhinweg
Pick some fixed amount of time--say 8-12 minutes--and play until the time runs out. For the Super Bowl, keep playing until there's a winner. For other playoff games, go to the "shootout" (the college format) after a specified number of overtime periods.
And if there is injury concern for the regular season, just go back to accepting ties in regulation.
love the barely visible Mornhinweg zing! I almost didn't see it. Ha!
March 28th, 2010 at 11:58 AM ^
I've seen dumber ideas for NFL overtime -- for instance, there's the old NFL overtime rule and the new NFL overtime rule. Give the man a gold star.
If it were up to me, I'd say go ahead and kick off from the 30 and play as much as possible as a normal game, but I can see why you might want to put the offense in a better position to score. I don't like the 2:00 offense rule, it takes too much away from running teams. To spice things up, maybe you take away the extra point and make teams go for the two-point conversion. Offenses in the NFL are strong enough that it will be unusual for teams to go through an entire quarter without scoring. If the overtime goes on forever, it'll probably because it's a really good game.
The point is to make sure both teams get a fair chance to go on offense. This rule would do that. While I'd do things a little differently, this is at least as good as the College OT.
K-Smooth
yeah, i didn't think about the fact that 2:00 would be much more limiting under NFL rules than NCAA. of course you could go with CFL rules where the clock stops after every play under 3 min, but that would probably mess with people too much =)
March 28th, 2010 at 12:24 PM ^
I wouldn't dismiss the injury concern. Note the number of players that go down in the fourth quarter compared to the first. Fatigued players tend to be less disciplined and more likely to do something to cause injury to themselves or others. Yes, players won't go to OT very often, but still, if you can minimize the incidence of injury in an OT session, it's worth doing.
(I do agree, though, that it's completely hypocritical to take that stance while pushing for an 18-game regular season.)
What if the NFL just made a rule that says the game can't end if the score is tied? (Kind of the like the game-can't-end-on-a-defensive-penalty rule). Then you wouldn't necessarily have OT, just a series of un-timed downs that would effectively extend the fourth quarter. You could eliminate arbitrary advantages like the coin-toss rule and the removal of special teams play--the game would just continue from whatever the situation at the end of regulation time was.
I'm not really taking a position for or against this approach, just putting it out there as another morsel for thought.
March 29th, 2010 at 11:55 AM ^
...than it would solve. scenario: tie game, team A gets the ball at their own 40 with 90 seconds in regulation. under that rule, they have _as long as they like_ to try to score. it's far better to have a system that encourages them to end it in regulation.
I think they need to fully adopt the college football overtime, that would be really exciting.
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