Football Zebras.com

It is no secret that we are very much opposed to the NFL’s modified sudden death format for the postseason. (Rather than repeat, see our rant from last year and our other posts.)

Hopefully we won’t have to reference them, but here are the new overtime rules:

• Modified sudden death only applies in the cases where the team receiving the opening kickoff scores a field goal on the opening drive. In all other cases, standard sudden death will apply (a touchdown, a safety, or a field goal after first possession).
• If there is any change of possession or the receiving team does not recover the kickoff, they have surrendered the first possession, and standard sudden death applies.
• If a field goal is scored, the trailing team will receive the ensuing kickoff. Then, if the trailing team…
  • …scores a touchdown, the game ends, and the touchdown decides the result.
  • …loses possession, including on downs, the game ends immediately.
  • …scores a tying field goal, the overtime reverts to a standard sudden death.

Jeff Triplette, meet Dante Hicks. Much like the downtrodden cashier from Clerks, Triplette was not even supposed to be here this Sunday. Triplette was heading Scott Green’s crew while the rest of Triplette’s crew had the holiday weekend off.

So when overtime began in San Diego between the Broncos and Chargers, Triplette had a slight sleight of mind. During the coin toss, he announced to both teams:

Each team must have an opportunity to possess the football and score.

Except, that’s not the rule. At least not in the regular season. He was citing the newly enacted, never used rule that overtime goes into “modified sudden death” in the playoffs. But first score always wins during the regular season.

[Video link at NFL.com changed on us. We are looking for a new link to the announcement.]

Of course, there is much ado over nothing, as Triplette corrected his announcement. He is not the first referee to recant a misstated rule. With a 123-page rule book and 113-page case book that must be recalled on a moment’s notice, it’s actually a surprise that the officials are right more than 98% of the time.

But, it would be nice to not have an overtime coin-toss controversy on Thanksgiving weekend (see: 1998).

It was a solution looking for a problem.

In 1941, the NFL adopted the sudden-death overtime into the rulebook, initially to break ties only in divisional playoff games (at that time divisional playoffs were similar to baseball’s one-game playoff). It was expanded to include the league championship (actually, all postseason games, including the future wild-card playoffs) in 1946, with the first use in the 1957 championship game now known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” In 1974, the league allowed for a single overtime period to be added to regular season and exhibition tie games.

Up to the conclusion of the 2009 season, that was the entire history of the modification to overtime rules. Three sentences only, and in each case, expanding overtime to a wider set of games.

No extra innings. No field-goal shootouts. No rematches. Its brutally final and decisive verdict of fortune is so very defining of football, comedian George Carlin famously contrasted it to baseball’s relatively relaxed and semantically smooth system of extra innings. (Story continues after this comedy break.)

Last March, change came for the sake of change. As Competition Committee co-chairman Rich McKay stated, “sometimes you want to get ahead of a problem and not behind it.” The change was to protect the game from something so unfair, that it was feared it would tarnish the result of sports’ ultimate championship game. According to McKay, “we really felt like you wouldn’t want that game to end — a Super Bowl, a conference championship game — where there’s a kickoff, one pass, field goal, game over.”

The league owners, on the recommendation of the Competition Committee, passed a system of “modified sudden death,” but did so in a cowardly fashion: by deliberately moving the item up on the owners’ meeting agenda so that coaches and players were not present to raise any objections with the plan.

Overtime now allows for a rebuttal by the team that surrenders a first-possession field goal. There was supposedly a fundamental unfairness that a defense that allowed a team to advance into field-goal range was somehow determined by the flip of a coin. Since the kickoff location was moved to the 30-yard line in 1994, the percentage of field goals on the first possession went from 17.9 percent to 26.2 percent. While a significant statistical difference, the Competition Committee pins this solely on the kickoff location rule, rather than the other rules changes in that span that favored the offense, particularly in the passing game.

The modified sudden death applies only to playoff games. However, in 27 postseason overtime games, only three — including last year’s NFC Conference Championship — were decided on a one-possession field goal.

The Competition Committee had other proposals. “I have a file that’s this thick with overtime recommendations and changes,” said co-chairman McKay, without divulging some of the alternate proposals.

Modified sudden-death overtime rules

As best they can be summarized, without needless complexity, the modified sudden death will differ as follows:

• Modified sudden death only applies in the cases where the team receiving the opening kickoff scores a field goal on the opening drive. In all other cases, standard sudden death will apply (a touchdown, a safety, or a field goal after first possession).
• If there is any change of possession or the receiving team does not recover the kickoff, they have surrendered the first possession, and standard sudden death applies.
• If a field goal is scored, the trailing team will receive the ensuing kickoff. Then, if the trailing team…
  • …scores a touchdown, the game ends, and the touchdown decides the result.
  • …loses possession, including on downs, the game ends immediately.
  • …scores a tying field goal, the overtime reverts to a standard sudden death.

NFL OWNERS APPROVE ‘MODIFIED SUDDEN DEATH’

We think that the overtime format, more than 50 years removed from its first use with no modification, has worked just fine. However, if we were on the Competition Committee—and we had to make a modification to overtime—we would have considered the following proposals before “modified sudden death.”

1. Move the kickoff to the 35. The simplest solution to reverse the field-position advantage gained when kickoffs were moved back to the 30 yard line is to move the overtime kickoffs to the 35.

2. Replace the coin toss in overtime. Rather than let an arbitrary coin flip “decide overtime,” as is often (incorrectly) argued (roughly a 60/40 advantage goes to the coin-toss winner), use an on-field element to determine the first possession in overtime. By giving possession to the team last in the lead, a team couldn’t score a last-second tying field goal in regulation, win the coin toss, and then have the first possession in overtime (essentially preventing two consecutive possessions at the end of the game to the trailing team).

3. Start overtime from the fourth quarter dead-ball spot. A slightly more radical proposal would do away with the coin toss and kickoff to start overtime, and have the teams merely switch sides of the field as if the beginning of regulation was the same as the beginning of the second or fourth quarters. The only way* overtime could have a kickoff would be if the final play of regulation is the game-tying score. The slight downside is a tie game at the two-minute warning gives no urgency, as the offense could grind out a ten-minute drive through the first eight minutes of overtime, although that would be because it was allowed by the defense. (*There would also be no kickoff starting the third overtime period, either, but that has never happened in an NFL game.)

4. Best kickoff return. This is the most radical suggestion, and not my favortite, but only slightly better than the proposal voted by the owners. Essentially conduct two kickoffs to start overtime, with the team attaining the best field position keeping the ball. Of course, back-to-back runbacks to the house would turn overtime into a home-run derby.

NFL OWNERS APPROVE ‘MODIFIED SUDDEN DEATH’

The Competition Committee moved on changing the dynamic of postseason overtime on a nonexistent platform: field position after a kickoff gives a short field for an easy put-the-game-away field goal.

In postseason play, this situation has happened only three times. Yes, only three times has a team advanced the ball in overtime from kickoff to field goal in a playoff game, most recently in the 2009 NFC Championship game where the Saints advanced over the Vikings.

The Vikings, not one to sour on their lost destiny, voted against the modified sudden-death proposal. The Bills, Bengals and Ravens were the only others to reject the proposal

NFL OWNERS APPROVE ‘MODIFIED SUDDEN DEATH’

Unintended consequences of the new rule (that we see) are:

• Overtime can end on an unspectacular loss on downs, or worse, a measurement.
• Now, imagine a team is short on fourth down by measurement, the other team begins to celebrate a win, and the replay booth challenges the first-down spot — and the offense gets the first down! That is going to be an ugly scene, with a capital UGLY!
• There is less risk in tying the game at the conclusion of regulation, rather than boldly going for the lead.
• A team scoring the opening-possession field goal can follow up with an onside kick, ending the game if they recover (OK, that would be kinda cool, I suppose).
• The inequity supposedly created by the kickoff return offering field-goal prime field position is not remedied if both teams score field goals on their first possessions. This is because the next possession is sudden death, and it begins with the oh-so-dreaded kickoff.
• Defensive errors, magnified in overtime, can be softened when a second chance is awarded after surrendering a field goal.
• Somehow, a single drive in overtime ending in a field goal is unacceptable, but a game-winning field goal that breaks a tie at the expiration of the fourth quarter is just fine without a retaliatory possession by the losing team.

We will be adding to this list as a stream of consciousness. Add your suggestions in the comments.

1st major modification in league history

Yes, that headline is screaming. And for good reason. The NFL now can’t simply resolve a tie game much like Major League Baseball (if necessary, play till 5 a.m. to resolve .006  percentage points in the standings), the NHL (after five minutes, go to a shootout that resembles pregame warmups), and NCAA football (a sudden-life format that was called “last licks” in my elementary school days).

The NFL owners approved a “modified sudden death” system, in that a field goal on the first possession of overtime extends the overtime period for a retaliatory possession by the other team. If the score is then equalized, then the next score wins the game. Therefore, the “catch-up” team must score at least a tying field goal on the second possession to stay alive. A touchdown at any time ends the game.

Oddly, this is only implemented for the postseason. The league stance is that there are already separate rules for regular season and the postseason. (This difference is merely that one overtime is permitted in the regular season and an additional timeout is given in postseason.) This may be to avoid an odd, but plausible, circumstance where an overtime session only lasts two possessions because of two conservative, ball-controlling offenses, and thus adding the clock into that second possession.

Competition Committee members Bill Polian and Rich McKay (Colts and Falcons presidents) explained that there were fundamental inequities to the team losing the coin toss in overtime. We will dissect them in another post. You can watch the news conference here.