Pro football is a brutal game. If you allow each team to have the ball in OT ,you risk long games. Some college games go a long time before a result is determined. Tired players may be more vulnerable. The injury risk is not worth it.
It is also a TV game. The networks might protest overly long games interfering with schedules.
[quote=“Ellis_Dee, post:60, topic:466176”]
Are you even reading the thread? Many people have come up with objective ways the NFL should handle overtime. A sampling:[list=#][li]Don’t play overtime; just end the game in a tie.[/li][li]Keep playing full quarters until one ends with a winner.[/li][li]The “name that tune” auction strategy proposed by VarlosZ[/li][li]The Solomon-style bidding technique I described[/list]All of these proposals involve not changing the way the game is played because of a subjective preference for or against a particular aspect of the game of football. They are all objective.[/li][/QUOTE]
Don’t have much time here, but it’s obvious you don’t understand what “objective” and “subjective” mean. These solutions are all subjective solutions, favoring, respectively:[list=#][li]People who would rather see ties than OT[/li][li]People who would rather see a full quarter than a sudden death OT[/li][li]People who would like to introduce bidding to OT[/li][li]Er, again, people who want to bid[/list][/li]You see, words like “should,” “rather,” and “want” should tip you off that these are all SUBJECTIVE judgments. There is nothing objective about any them. They are just as subjective as any other suggestion or preference.
More later, perhaps.
Why not just take the luck out of the OT possession? Kick field goals, penalty kick style , winner gets first possession, instead of a coin toss? or award possession to the team with higest net yards? Race the 2 starting centers the length of the field? Anything…Surely there is a fair way that exists to allow a team to earn first OT possession, remove the luck- thereby eliminating all unfairness for any first possession advantage.
There’s always the XFL loose ball drill.
A fair criticism: as the OP claims, there is an overall slight advantage to winning the coin toss–53% over an unspecified period of time and 60% in “recent seasons” according to a later poster. The problem is that 29% of overtime games end without the team losing the coin toss getting the ball. Cite. I think that this aspect is what makes most people who don’t like the current overtime scheme dislike it. 29% means that nearly a full third of games end without the coin-toss-losing team getting a chance at all. This aspect is a valid criticism of the current system.
My solution: I would add a 5th quarter of 15 minutes wherein 7.5 (too many? too few?) MUST be played. At the end of the first 7.5 or 8 or 10 or whatever minutes, whoever is ahead wins. If nobody is, then sudden death begins for the remaining time seamlessly (no kickoff or anything like that). Sure, a coin toss winner could conceivably grind out a long drive to score, but more likely, each team would get the ball at least once. I don’t think this would make the eventual winner a 50/50 split based on the coin toss, but it does give each team a crack at the ball, the game can’t run more than an extra 15, and after a certain point either the team ahead wins OR it reverts to sudden death in a seamless way.
I went to a Lions /Bears game a few years ago. It was tied after 4 quarters. I went to get a beer to prepare for overtime. The Bears ran back the kickoff. In a few seconds it was over. I had a big overpriced beer . Crap.
I think the team that wins the coin toss should not be allowed to kick a field goal on their first possession. After that, anything goes.
I’m going back to the OP for a reason:
It quotes a mis-leading statistic.
While overall the advantage may only be 53%, recent advantage is more like 60%, presumably the result of the new kickoff rule (from the 30).
This means that the NCAA’s method (at 56%) is more fair than the NFL method.
In addition, the NFL method, as quixotic has been ably arguing, 30% of the time results in a win for a team that has not had to defend, and a loss for a team that has not had to attack. This has more than a mild sense of unfairness to it, placing an unreasonable importance upon the result of the coin toss, and artificially limiting the play of the game. It would be like baseball going into extra innings, and not letting the home team bat if the home team’s pitching allows the visitors a run.
Indeed, it should be noted that the NFL’s overtime method is the ONLY overtime method I can think of that does NOT guarantee both teams an equal chance to display their ability on both sides of the ball/puck/field. The fact that this is true should make clear to someone like EllisDee that the NFL method has a fatal flaw embedded in it. When no other sport or league in existence uses a method that requires your defense to stop the offense of the other team just so you can have your shot at offensive activity, it should be pretty clear that this is an important aspect to fair rules.
Now the argument about special teams has some merit. But the only way to include them, without getting into the issue of one team never taking the field on offense, is to play a set time without sudden victory. This would make OT much more fun in the NFL. Instead of returning a kick to the 35, then tossing a few passes to the opponent’s 35, then kicking a 52 yard FG to win the game, you’d see teams trying for TD’s in OT much more often. And, as I pointed out, even soccer gave up on the “golden goal” fairly quickly, realizing as it did that it had the potential for rewarding one team without letting the opponent have an equal shot at scoring.
But if we aren’t willing to have the NFL teams play an extra say 8 minutes for certain, then I say use the NCAA rules and the hell with kickoffs and punts. After all, it’s fair, and it’s damned exciting. 
I don’t have any major problems with the scheme as it is now, but I could live with this.
If I had to tinker, I’d say keep the original scheme, but eliminate punting. Now the team that wins the toss has a chance to win on its first possession, but it can also go 4-and-out and lose the game. Or to put it another way, the defense would have a chance to win it in OT and the coin toss would mean less because it would no longer be a no-brainer to receive the kickoff.
But my top choice would be to eliminate OT altogether in the regular season. This would make the end of games more interesting and would break up the playoff races down the stretch – fewer cases of 3 9-7 teams chasing 2 playoff spots, and one team being left out because it beat a good AFC team and lost to a bad NFC team or vice versa.
I know about the 53% but I would like to see the percentage where the team that wins the toss gets the ball and scores without the other team getting the ball back - at then how many of those were by field goal.
Update: a little hunting turned up this 2002 articlere: kickoffs and currtent trends
Again, you fail to understand what I’m saying.
You don’t like sudden death because you like offense, and feel it’s somehow “unfair” if one team doesn’t get to put its offense on the field. You have not demonstrated in any way whatsoever exactly how this is unfair; you just take it as a given.
Because you think a football team hasn’t “gotten a shot” if they haven’t put their offense on the field, you want to craft an overtime format that is played in a way that football isn’t normally played. The sole reason for this is because you want offense on the field. That’s the subjective part. You want to change overtime to a different set of rules than the game normally has in order to favor an aspect of the game you like.
By contrast, the objective schemes I listed are overtime formats that don’t change the way the game is played in the overtime period. Overtime ends up being played the same way that regulation is played. This is an objectively good thing.
No it does not. Please explain how it is unfair.
Keep in mind that many, many games are won by the winning team running out the clock, never letting the opposing team get a final possession. This is a highly commonplace occurance, and the standard strategy when you have a lead late in the game. It is also far and away the most common strategy when tied late in the fourth quarter. Run the clock down to nothing while you get in position to kick the game-winning field goal.
How can a phenomenon that is so common to the game itself all of a sudden become an unfair thing when it happens in overtime?
Will somebody please explain that to me?
This is a particularly poor analogy. It is not all that unusual for the game-winning overtime score to happen without the offense, either in the form of a defensive TD, a safety, or a kickoff return TD.
Again, as I have said many times, it is not the format that prevents your offense from touching the ball. It is not because of a rule passed down from the league office.
There is one and only one reason your offense doesn’t get a shot, and that’s because your team failed to give them that shot. It is the sole responsibility of the team. That’s what makes it fair.
EllisDee, no matter how many times you utter your mantra on this issue, it doesn’t change the facts.
The baseball analogy was very good. There are two main things a football team does: play offense and play defense. Special teams play is divided up into six main categories, none of which happens very frequently in a game (at least, you hope you aren’t punting more than five times or so). So focusing on offense and defense we see that in the NFL, 30% of the time (minus whatever miniscule percentage of games are won on opening OT kickoff returns) the team that loses does so while only getting to put its defense on the field. You say that they had a chance to stop the other team. But so did the defense for the home team in baseball, and no one suggests changing baseball so that the first run scored wins.
Look at tennis, look at basketball, look at hockey, look at all other levels of football, look at soccer, look at golf, look at every damn game that has an overtime or extra time rule. Every single one of them allows all participants to have their equal ability to display all aspects of the game involved in the OT. Shootout? Every team gets to try (the NFL version would be to let the first team to score on the shootout win, regardless of whether the other team had a shot; after all, your goalie could have stopped the shot!). Tiebreaker in tennis? Has to go at least to 7 points, meaning even in a walkover, each player has had a minimum of three serves and four defenses, or vice versa.
There is a REASON all other methods of breaking ties use some similar concept: it is unfair not to let each side have an equal opportunity to display whatever aspect of the game is involved in the tiebreaker.
Your continued attempts to assert this is not true simply show your opinion is of little value in this discussion.
To add to DSYoungEsq’s response, this statement of yours I quoted is absolutely, baffling untrue. Of COURSE it’s the format that prevents the offense from touching the ball! The “rule passed down from the league office” is the mandate that overtime in the NFL is sudden death. That’s the whole goddamned point of this thread, isn’t it?
sigh No matter how many times I address this, you just won’t get it, will you? Ah well, I suppose I’ll try once more. The reason sudden death OT is unfair is because, sometimes (~30%), one team doesn’t get to put HALF of its team on the field. More insulting is that this lack results from a coin flip. How would you feel if the rule was, “If the ref flips a coin that shows Heads twice in a row, no player with an odd number on their jersey gets to play”? There’s only a one in four chance that such a situation will occur, but it’s still capricious and unfair to exclude (roughly) half of a team because of a piece of thin metal.
I’ve discussed many times why I think it’s unfair, as have others. You disagree. It’s my opinion against yours, and that’s why this entire conversation is subjective. For you to maintain that your position isn’t subjective, that instead it is based on some objective way at looking at the game is preposterous.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t YOUR OT system played in a way that football isn’t normally played? That is, football during the first four quarters isn’t sudden death.
Blah blah blah ridiculous and wrong, even though you’ve said it a million times now and I’ve corrected you a million times. The sole reason I want something other than sudden death OT is so that both sides of both teams get a crack at showing what they can do. It has nothing to do with preferring offense over defense; it has everything to do with measuring the full complement of one team against another.
Awww horesepucky. A sudden death OT isn’t played the same way that regulation is played. There is no “bidding” in football at all, so to change the rules to add it isn’t nothing like playing the same way that regulation is played. Ties aren’t “objectively” how regulation is played (I can’t even parse how this nonsense would make sense).
Actually, no. The reason the sudden death overtime in today’s NFL is unfair is because the team that wins the toss gets a 3:2 advantage (that is, they win the game about 60% of the time). If sudden death overtime yielded 50-50 results between the team that wins the coin toss and the team that loses it (as it did prior to the rules changes in 1994), then it would be perfectly fair, though not always “symmetrical.”
Point taken. Perhaps “unfair” isn’t the best word. I’m looking for something along the lines of “undesirable” or “unsatisfactory.” It doesn’t sit well with me that a team can lose, and there’s nothing that ~half the team can do to stop it.
OK, here goes.
First and foremost. No Fucking Ties! Ties are fine for games like Hockey and Soccer where scoring is sometimes very infrequent and the likelihood of a protracted 0-0 game is a somewhat common possible outcome. But scoring in the modern NFL is not uncommon and it becomes increasingly common as time passes in a game, back in the early days of football when scoring was often rare and single digit scoring was common between evenly matched teams ties made more sense. To pretend that modern football somehow should regress to that rule when the game is so different is silly.
I’m not of the opinion that overtime should somehow be “fair”. Many things about sport, and particularly football, are not fair and no solution is going to be perfectly equitable. The issue with the current system is not that the coin flip is “unfair” it’s that it’s random.
I dislike watching the current system because I find that watching a team return a kick to the 35 yard line, gaining 30 yards on quick slants and off tackle runs before spending the final 3 plays centering the ball before trotting out a kicker to make a 52 yard kick incredibly dull and unsatisfying. I rarely see this and feel that the better team necessarily won.
I would prefer a system where a team is rewarded for being aggressive and trying to score touchdowns. That said, if the sudden death format is here to say I’d much rather see possession awarded using any other method than a coin flip. Grant possession to the Home team and reinforce the advantage to being the home team. People don’t complain that MLB games are unfair because the home team get last bats, lets migrate the same mindset to the NFL. Alternatively grant possession to the Road team under the rationale that the home team had the advantage for the first 4 quarters and should have put the game away in the first 60 minutes. Either way I’m fine, so long as it eliminates the randomness. Perhaps this should be extended to the concept of the opening coin flip, get rid of it and give the Home team the choice by default, and then the Road team gets it in OT.
If the Coin Flip has to stay and some esoteric “fairness” must be achieved then I think playing a full 5th period is the only possible solution. The college system is unfair in that the team going second has advantage (though remember this is alternated after each team gets the ball once) the NFL system is unfair in that the team who starts with the ball has the advantage. Ellis Dee’s argument that one team’s defense being on the field is somehow inherently equal to the other teams offense is flawed. I’m a traditional fan, I love the Bears and Defensive Football, but to argue that the team that has the ball isn’t at the advantage is foolish. Point in case, the 2006 Super Bowl Bears, the Rex Grossman Bears, that dominated just about every conceivable defensive category, when going into OT versus an better than average Bucs defense, chose to take the ball and go on offense. They won that game with a 25 yd FG and the Bucs offense never touched the ball. By all rationales the Bears defense was their best squad and had the best matchup versus the Bucs, if their being on defense was not a huge disadvantage strategically they would have kicked and tried to pin the Bucs deep or gotten a turnover.
I like the idea of a “must score 4 points” from an entertainment perspective, and it’d be very interesting from a gambling standpoint, but its just a little too untraditional for my tastes.
Another idea is that we should stick with the sudden death concept, but maybe we should award possession to the team who was on defense last in regulation. This would discourage teams from kneeling down at the end of the 4th quarter to settle for overtime. It would be essentially a continuation of play for when a FG ties the game as time expires. It might also encourage more teams to go for a victory with a 2 point conversion at the end of regulation following a TD instead of settling for a tying PAT.
My suggestions:
-
A simple 5th period. It can be 5, 8, 10, 15 minutes long, whatever, but this is the fairest and one that requires the least manipulation of the rules and style of play.
-
Sudden Death, but without the coin flip. Institute some non-arbitrary method of awarding possession. Home team, road team, last to score, last to possess the ball, whatever. Not necessarily “fair” but it doesn’t rely on randomness. Teams would always know entering the final minutes of the 4th quarter who will be getting the ball in OT and can adjust their play calling to adjust. Teams would have less to complain about, if they had a strong offense that wasn’t going to get the ball first in OT then they can be a little riskier in their final possessions of regulation to compensate.
The college system is better than the current NFL system, but not by a lot. And it’d wreak havoc with TV programming.
Moving the kickoff from the 30 to the 35 would probably make the outcome of overtime to be closer to 50-50 but I’m not entirely clear why 50% is somehow the goal. Who said overtime should be a coin flip? Who says no one should have an advantage?
One side benefit of awarding possession in OT to the “Home” team is that it would give teams a little more incentive to play the final games of the season to win. If you extend the “best record gets home field” rationale beyond the playoffs and into the Super Bowl that’s one more reason for two 12-3 teams in each conference to try and win that final game when home field advantage in this perspective extends to the neutral Super Bowl site.
This is not true. In hockey if the team winning the face off shoots the puck into the net before the other team has had a chance to try and score, the game is still over.
It’s good to see that you’ve conceded your entire argument.
You don’t care whether or not it’s fair at all. All you care about is that offense gets on the field.