by David Werdiger

Created on: April 26, 2009

You have to ask: who wants to change the overtime rule? Surely, it would be teams that have lost the overtime toss, and been unable to defend against the opponent scoring. On the other hand, teams that either won the toss, or had confidence in their defence to either score, or hold the opposition may have no problem with it.

NFL is a game with two (really three) teams: offence and defence. They each have different personnel, different coaches, and different rankings. Some teams are really good at one, and not as good at the other. While big offence is often what makes headlines and what fans love to see, there has been debate over which of the two makes a champion team. In the last few years, teams have gone deep into the playoffs with pedestrian offences and fast, attacking, swarming defences. From a team success perspective, we cannot say that one is better than the other.

One controversy regarding the overtime rule is the use of a coin-toss to determine which team chooses to kick away or to receive. The assumption of those who want to change the rule is that the coin-toss winner will always choose to field their offence first. This is incorrect. Teams sometimes choose to put their defence on first. The assumption is that the team that plays their offence first will win most of the time. Again, this is incorrect. So the coin toss does not have as strong an impact as people think.

Another issue is whether to play the overtime period as sudden death (i.e. first score wins) or that the winner is whoever is leading at the end of a full period (so make it a five "quarter" game). While this can make this issue of a coin-toss less relevant, it should be considered that players may be very fatigued at the end of four quarters, and making them play a full additional one is too much, can lead to injury, and may not reflect as fair as result. An extra quarter makes the game 25% longer, which is very significant.

A third option is simply not to have overtime at all, and if the scores are tied at the end of regulation time, deem the game a draw. However, in a season that only lasts sixteeen games, this may result in too many draws. In Australian Rules football, this rule applies (during the regular season), but because of the scoring system, there are usually just two or three draws in 132 games of a regular season. In soccer, there are lots more draws, but also lots more games, and a "home" and "away" goals are weighted differently. Around ten percent of NFL games go into overtime, and that would result in too many draws to adequately rank the teams.

The overtime rule for NFL has been in place for many years, and changing long-standing rules in any sport must be undertaken with care. Based on the above, I don't see a compelling argument for change.

Learn more about this author, David Werdiger.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.