Football Zebras.com

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’

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

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.

The NFL homepage ran an Associated Press story quoting the Rich McKay, Falcons president and Competition Committee co-chairman. As it does almost every year, according to the commissioner, the Competition Committee is looking into the competitive balance of the current sudden-death overtime format. The committee met in Indianapolis before the Scouting Combine and are currently adjourned until March.

The review will likely lead to no change in the overtime rules. If there is a change, it would be nothing more than moving the overtime kickoff forward five yards.

Three reasons lead me to believe there is no change: (1) there is no formal proposal submitted for a specific rule change; (2) coaches still favor the system as it has existed since it was implemented in 1974; (3) Jeff Fisher, Titans head coach and the other committee co-chairman, is encouraging more study into any possible changes.

The one thing that keeps coming up is the idea that the coin flip determines the outcome. Of course, this discounts the role of the defense and the special teams—all important parts of a balanced team. However, I propose doing away with the coin flip and giving the option to the team that was last in the lead. In other words, if your team caused the tie, it is the same as if your team lost the coin flip. This also eliminates the possibility of a team tying in the final seconds of the fourth quarter, winning the toss, and scoring on the first possession of overtime.

In his second annual State of the League address, Commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the Competition Committee would be looking at a possible revision to the overtime rules. This idea has new traction after Peyton Manning watched the entire overtime period from the bench in the Colts’ Wild Card loss to the Chargers. However, the Eagles and Bengals kept each other from mounting more than a 30-yard drive in the extra session, ending that Week 11 game in a tie.

Commissioner Goodell, on a question about the coin flip determining the winner of the overtime:

I think every year we look back at our overtime rules. I would disagree very strongly … that the game is determined by a coin flip. The point of the game is to win it in regulation. There is a great coach over here, Tony Dungy, who said something to me earlier this year and I think it’s important — that once that coin is flipped and you’ve determined who gets the ball, you still have to get into scoring position. So, this game is about teamwork. It’s about offense, defense and special teams. You have to earn your way to get that opportunity and if you do, you win the game. So, there is a lot of debate about all overtime rules, including the college overtime rules. We’ll look at that. We’ll look at every alternative and we’ll try to come up with something that we think makes sense. We think the rule we have is a terrific rule and it’s served us well.

When asked about removing the option for a field goal on the first drive of overtime, Goodell responded:

It’s been considered before, and I’m sure it will be considered among the alternatives. There are other ways of addressing the field goal on the first drive, and I think it is something the Competition Committee needs to consider because what we’ve seen in our statistics is that historically about 30 percent of the games in overtime are decided with a team who wins the coin flip scoring on the first possession. That number has risen to about 47 percent, and I think that’s significant, and I think it’s something our committee needs to look at. When you couple that with the fact that our field goal kickers are much more accurate than they have been in the past, that is a danger. We have talked about different concepts, and the committee will discuss this. And I’ve had some discussions with some of the committee members individually. Should we move the kickoff so that the ball, theoretically at least, would be, the drive would start further back? If they drive down and they kick a long field goal, they deserve to win. So, that suggestion that you’re making has been discussed. We’ll discuss it among the other alternatives, and I’m sure they’ll come up with a recommendation by the end of March.

As we just marked the 50th anniversary of the first overtime game (let’s forget for a moment that  1955 preseason game between the Los Angeles Rams and New York Giants), the overtime rules have been revised exactly once: to include overtime in the regular season in 1974. Usually, a high-profile case, such as the Colts–Chargers game, will bring this to the front of discussion, and time and time again, overtime is left just as it is.

If there is going to be a change, there are only two concessions that I would allow without hurting the integrity of the overtime system:

I wouldn’t mind seeing the coin toss replaced with the options given to the team last in the lead. In most cases, this would mean the team that caused the tie to kick off in overtime. It’s not the strongest, but it adds an on-field element to something that is completely random.

Second, the suggestion of moving the kickoff in overtime has some merit. The kicking game has changed tremendously since the implementation of regular-season overtime, that it has slightly tipped the balance in the fifth frame. This variation was dismissed wholeheartedly by the commissioner-emeritus Paul Tagliabue during his tenure, but seems to now be under consideration.

Other suggestions to win by six points or to equalize the number of possessions change “sudden death” dynamic into “extra innings.” Hopefully, there is no serious consideration of these options.