The Canadian league does something like this, although they start farther out. Maybe it’s too radical for the NFL.
That’s only in the regular season.
In the post-season, the overtime record stands at 10-2, i.e. the team that wins the toss has won the game 10 times and lost twice. And one of those losses was this last post-season.
That’s not a huge sample size but it is a rather stark difference. The WAG is that teams that make the playoffs tend to have better offenses and there’s less incentive to limiting players’ snaps so results are different than the regular season.
I don’t have any idea as to the answers to these questions. But the NFL (as well as the NCAA) determined that it would be in their best interests to lessen the number of ties, and in the case of the NCAA, eliminate tie games entirely. I, for one, am glad that they decided to do so, and I would guess that the vast majority of fans agree with my sentiment.
The only sport that I’m aware of where a tie is an acceptable result is soccer. (Hockey now goes to an overtime followed by a shootout to determine a winner.) Draws are treated quite differently in soccer than in the NFL. Soccer awards 3 points in the standings for a win and 1 point for a draw. In the NFL, however, the standings are determined by win percentage. A tie game is treated as a ‘half-win’. For instance, last season the Steelers were involved in the only tie game; they finished with a record of 9-7-1. Their winning percentage was .559, which is the result of the equation (9.5/17).
Let’s assume that the Steelers finished with another tie, for a final record of 9-6-2. Their winning percentage would have been the same as the first-place Bengals, who finished 10-7. I have no idea how a tiebreaker would work in that situation, but that’s what I mean by convolution.
Now, since overtime was introduced, no team has finished with two ties. But if you look back to 1973, the last year before overtime was introduced, there were four teams that finished with two ties, and another six teams finished with one tie. Those results may very will have been the impetus for the NFL to introduce overtime in an effort to reduce the number of tie games. And their efforts have been successful.
Perhaps I missed it but I don’t see any details for the proposal yet. I’m wholeheartedly in favor of both teams getting possession but I think there can be both good and bad implementations. I think the NCAA method is a lot of fun but it doesn’t quite feel right for an NFL game. Simply having each team kickoff/punt once could work, but I worry a little that this would simply swing the balance to favor the team who gets the ball second too much.
Broadly speaking I’m in favor of almost any rule which creates more football. Perhaps I’ll get labeled as a Neanderthal but I think a lot of the teeth gnashing about extra games or extra overtimes is way overblown. Yes football is brutal, yes it’s dangerous, but if that’s your concern then the discussion should be about banning it or changing it entirely. Not simply doing marginally less of the really dangerous thing.
One idea that I like is taking a baseball-style approach to overtime. Do away with the coinflip entirely. Award the visiting team the ball first, award the home team the ball second. I think ties are stupid and pointless, but if everyone agreed to limit the overtime pattern to one possession each in thergular season and if it’s still tied it’s a tie I’d get over it. But if both teams get one possession and then it becomes sudden death…that’s stupid. Sudden death is inherently unfair, either get rid of it entirely or make your peace with that fact and don’t change anything.
Hell, if we simply made the rule that the existing rules stay the same but we give first possession to the home team I think most people would be OK with that. It’s not “fair” but it’s also not random.
If you read the link about the CFL rules I posted earlier, they make one good point: under the CFL rules, both the offense and the defense have to contribute to an overtime win. The offense has to score to put them ahead of the other team, and then the defense has to hold the line, and prevent the other team from scoring more points.
So any OT win requires a true full-team effort, which is in keeping with the spirit of the whole game.
That’s fine, but pretty much every proposal (with the exception of the current implementation in the NFL) has that feature. The CFL approach is not unique.
I think something like this could work since everyone agrees that they hate ties but the teams don’t want extra playing time to break the tie.
You’d have to find some kind of objective stat from the game that the league is in agreement represents the more dominant team. The total offensive yards seems like a good one.
Something about using in-game stats to break the tie just feels wrong to me. I’m not sure I can articulate why. Maybe something about the idea that stats mean shit if you can’t put points on the board.
This would not work because yards are a very poor indicator of success. Teams with very successful return games (or facing teams with very poor kicking teams) tend to require fewer yards to score. Teams whose defenses force a lot of turnovers will similarly have a very low number of yards since their starting field position will be improved. Tying wins/losses directly to any stat other than points is rife with problems and would inherently be arbitrary. You think coin tosses piss people off…
Someone who uses this kind of phrase when they mean “score tied at the end of regulation” will never understand. 
It’s really just that we Americans don’t like ties. I can’t stand them myself, and it’s one of the reasons that soccer drives me crazy (that, and they need more refs. And more scoring). I love watching rugby – I know you can tie in rugby, but there are so many ways to score so many different values, with (usually) a lot of scoring happening, that ties seem really unusual.
I think it pretty much is that simple. Sports culture here doesn’t like ties.
But then again on the other hand, if you have a defense that forces a lot of turnovers, and that results in your offense not having to rack up a lot of yardage, you might argue that that same defense is also preventing the opponent from gaining much as much yardage as they need.
This, however, is almost certainly true.
But this is the same league that breaks ties for playoff spots by going down a checklist until the situation breaks one way or the other. I don’t think it’s ever happened, but it’s possible that someone could end up getting a spot by winning a coin toss.
No, it’s literally just soccer fans that have gaslit much of the world into thinking ties are somehow a satisfactory result. It’s not like there’s some huge catalog of non-American sports where ties are a super regular thing. Its really just soccer.
They’re both losers. Losers!
With the exception of the final step, every tiebreaker is based completely on wins and losses or point differential. Wins and points are the only valid measures in football of “quality”. Everything else is circumstantial and in most cases not even informative.
Not really. Rugby (league and union) has draws, chess has draws, cricket has ties and draws (the difference is as confusing to me as everything else in cricket), Aussie football has draws.
No @RitterSport had it right, it really isn’t just soccer.
You need to look a couple of other channels on your ESPN cable service.
Probably the majority of sports played allow draws as legitimate results.
Soccer, cricket, net ball, rugby union, rugby league (some leagues play golden point), AFL, gallops, pacing and greyhound racing, field hockey, track, field, swimming, essentially all the summer and winter olympic events
But the US really likes there to be a clear winner.
Hence you also have first-past-the-post, winner takes all and the Electoral College.
It would be funny to have a draw in an election – OK, the candidates tied, so both/neither will be your president.
It is really interesting to me how different the US is from the rest of the world on this topic. If I watch a game that ends up tied, it’s really frustrating to me, very anti-climactic. Why did I waste my time?? Not really, but definitely a little of that.
Why would the tie breaker to distinguish between two teams who finished 9-6-2 and 10-7-0 be any different or more convoluted than the tiebreaker used to split two teams who finished 10-7-0?
Regular-season wins and losses in selected games could certainly be regarded as meaningful in breaking ties for a playoff spot, but I’m not convinced that points scored over multiple previous games wouldn’t be subject to the same criticism you’re leveling at yardage. Maybe to a lesser degree, but still.
At any rate, none of that tells us with any degree of confidence who would win if they were to just bite the damn bullet and play a tie-breaking game. I reckon that wouldn’t be feasible for a number of reasons, and you’d still have people howling when the inevitable bad call comes on whether a guy legally caught a pass in the final minute.
Back to the original question, I haven’t looked into it, but is there any chance that changing the extra point kick has had an effect on number of ties, given that it adds more variety to the possibilities for likely final scores? If it can be determined that it has, maybe consider making scoring more “granular” to reduce the chances of a tie. Let field goals of forty-plus yards be worth four points. Oh, yeah. That’s gonna change end-game strategy in close games too. Maybe a fifty-plus-yard touchdown play is worth seven points.