The dark side of parity in the NFL

The BBQ Pit
1

Here we are, folks. “Any Given Sunday” is, in my opinion, now a reality. Bengals can beat you. Detroit can beat you. The games are closer and fourth-quarter officiating and overtime procedures are now seen as a problem.

I don’t see it that way.

If you don’t want the officials to “decide the game with a last-second flag”, or “I can’t stand that the first team that touches the ball can win the game”, then don’t put yourself in that position. If you’re tied up late in the game, you’re begging for it.

Coaches should consider the wider use of two-point tries as the game progresses. Start thinking about it in the third, if you’re just trading touchdowns. The extra margin forces the other team to try to match the two-pointer too. Sooner or later, someone will drop a pass or get stacked up at the line and go two points down. If it’s you, then you have to try harder to get that next drive as a result. Play the game to win, not to tie it up and bitch about the rules and the officials.

The overtime is deliberately short in terms of actual time for a very good reason. The games shouldn’t run so long that the early games conflict with the late games. There’s no reason for that. If your team is in the late game and two teams that you couldnt care less about are in the 5th overtime of the early game because they both have good kickers, then you can’t watch your game. The overtime rules are a good deterrent for that. One decent drive ends with a field goal, and here’s the late game after these words.

Overtime isn’t broken, and I don’t expect the NFL to fix it.

Win the game outright. Play to win, not to take a chance on winning the next coin toss. If the kicker is the difference in the game, then you should be in the end zone more often. I’m almost to the point of asking for the kicked extra point to either get pushed back to about the range of 40-45 yards, or just abolished.

A lot of people wanted parity. They are all now going to have to face up to the fact that parity also means you can’t just kick it all the time and play it safe.

Quit whining about the last-second flags and the overtime rules. Your team was out there for the whole game and could have played it differently.

2

I don’t know about that. At times, it seems like my team never shows up! :frowning:

3

I wanted to change the overtime rules to a system where 6 points wins.
Until I read what you wrote here.
I think you are right in everthing you said.
Overtime should be avoided if at all possible.

Now put on a helmet and get out there and hurt somebody ~

4

More reasons why I don’t watch Pro football.

I went skiing last Sunday and had a ball! :slight_smile:

Ah, forget it.

5

I agree with the idea of playing to win. That’s often my pet peeve in football is that the coaches are wussies. They never want to go for it.

That’s the one thing I like about college football; when the team needs points, they’ll pull out trick plays and fake punts, anything to get the ball in the endzone.

But not in the No Fun League. Besides, it doesn’t matter, cause my team loses anyway. Our coach isn’t just a wus, he’s a stupid wus. By the way, incase you missed my location on the left, I’m a Lions fan.

6

Oh! I hate hate hate it when people bitch about the games being decided by one call, or the overtime rules, or whatever. Look bitches, you have 60 minutes to win the fucking game. If you play harder, smarter, faster ball than the other team, you win. If you are playing good football it won’t matter what the OT rules are, because you would have won in regulation!
It’s even worse when “an entire season comes down to one call.” No, an entire season came down to how the team performed. That’s it. Are there bad calls made? yes. But again, if you are playing good football it won’t matter.
Nobody plays perfectly. Whoever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins the ballgame. So just fucking deal, for Christ’s sake.

7

  1. The Bengals will not beat you on any given Sunday. The Bengals will beat you on 6.25% of Sundays. :slight_smile:

  2. I agree heartily that coaches often don’t play to win, but to not lose badly. TMQ on ESPN Page2 harps on this a lot.

  3. BUT, going for two in the third is dumb unless you’re way behind. There are just too many scoring possibilities, and we routinely see games decided by one point, or teams down by four who have to go for the TD rather than having options. This is often the result of a completely unneccessary 2 point attempt in the third quarter which failed. Going for 2 is just plain bad coaching unless you’re either down by three scores, in the fourth quarter, or are way ahead and just want to be jerks by running up the score.

8

Well, I spoke too soon. That’s 12.5% of Sundays, I’ll have you know…

9

I agree with what you aresaying in the situation in which one team is heavily favored, and they play a half-assed conservative game, and end up losing to the underdogs, who played their hearts out, on a suspicious call. Don’t blame the call in that case, you cowardly losers! (One might put the Miami Hurricanes in this category).

But what if it’s the other way around? The plucky but overmatched underdogs valiantly hang tough, play their little hearts out, miraculously put themselves in a position to win the game by playing the game of their lives, and then lose on the last play, which features a demonstrably incorrect call from the officials?

Or two teams BOTH play phenomenal ball in an exciting back-and-forth game, and one team ends up down 8 in regulation, and throws every effort into their last drive, scoring and making the 2-point conversion, forcing overtime. Then NFL overtime happens, which is heavily influenced by a coin flip. Sure, if the team says “we blame our loss entirely on the coin flip. It’s not our fault at all” they’re being stupid, but it’s possible to complain about the stupidity and random nature of NFL overtimes (particularly with many obvious alternatives available) without being crybabies who refuse to take responsibility for their won actions.

By your argument, the overtime rule could simply be “if the score is tied at the end of regulation, decide the winner by a coin flip”, and no one would have the right to complain, because hey, if they hadn’t been tied at the end of regulation, there wouldn’t have been overtime.

10

But I think the OT rules are fair. Yeah, I know the frustration of watching my team lose because the other team won the toss and scored first. But dems da breaks. If the offense outplays the defense enough to get into field-goal range, then they deserve to lose.

11

Nah, I don’t agree the OT rules are fair. As I mentioned in another thread, the team winning the toss wins the game on their first possession 49% of the time, and 70% of the time overall. 70-30 is a big edge.

As for “if the defense was good enough, they wouldn’t let the offense into field goal range first time down the field” argument, I have to agree with the way Mike Lupica put it on The Sports Reporters Sunday morning. The average team will return a kickoff to the 30-yard line. Now they only have to advance to the other 30 to kick a field goal. Off the opening kickoff, against a fresh defense, that’s a challenge. After 60 minutes of football, it’s a pretty easy task. Why not give both defenses a shot at making a game-winning stop?

Personally, I don’t think there should be overtime at all. The best football game I’ve ever seen in person was a Penn State-Notre Dame clash in the mid-80’s, when Notre Dame scored a touchdown to pull to within 21-20 in the last minute. Notre Dame could have held their ranking, and still gone to a major bowl, with a tie, but Lou Holtz went for the two and the win. They didn’t make it, but every fan I heard on both sides commended Holtz for his courage. If overtime had been allowed, ND would have just kicked the point and we would have had boring old overtime. Instead, it was a game that everyone remembered. I remember reading a soccer writer who called penalty kicks a “manufactured drama.” Sometimes I feel the same way about overtime.

12

I still remember the first football game I ever attended - a 13-13 tie between LSU and Ohio State…I was thrilled with the this statistical anomaly.
I was reading in the Washington Post today that Dan Rooney (owner of the Steelers) is in favor of changing the current NFL overtime schema. The tenor of the article was such, that this just might happen…I’ll believe it when I see it.

13

Ok, having found my source, I’m going to call you on this 70/30 stat:

From TMQ:

Which means that the team that wins the coint toss only wins on the first possession 27% of the time, and essentially 50/50 overall. Now, Gregg Easterbrook may be wrong, but he’s a pretty decent source. Moreover, I have seen reference elsewhere to the NFL checking this stat every year to make sure that it hovers around 50/50 overall.

I highly suspect you’re looking at this season’s figures, which have been much higher than usual. Maybe you’re not, but until you show it, I call bullshit.

14

Wow. You got me, Myrr21, and I stand corrected. I’m never going to trust anything I hear on The Sports Reporters again. (Don’t those ESPN guys ever talk to each other??)

I still don’t like the way OT is set up, mind, and actually TMQ agrees on that point.

Two questions, though, brought up by those stats.

  1. If the NFL decided that the coin toss OT favored a team, would they change the rule? I had always believed the sudden-death OT was for the benefit of television coverage.

  2. Only 27 percent of the time, against a tired defense, the team receiving the kickoff in OT scores on its first possession? Man, I never would have believed it.

15

To add to that, www.nd.edu/~scholast/2002_11_14/splinters.html+NFL+overtime+win+percentage&hl=en&ie=UTF-8"]here’s what I hope is the Google cache of a site showing that the numbers you’re quoting are for this year only, while I found other cites (they’re easy to locate) supporting a 27/28% win on first possession, 50% win overall stat.

In short, you’re wrong. Or, right for this season, and this season only.

16

Shit, I’m sorry about railing on you…I clicked submit before you were there.

You’re right, though, that it has been unbalance this year. I suspect it’s because of a lot of teams with huge offenses and suspect D. When that’s the case, having the ball first is a huge advantage, obviously.

17

Right on!

18

You could, of course, solve all this OT bitching and give teams an added incentive to win in regulation by doing what just about every proper football code across the world does - drop OT altogether and allow ties during regulation time during the regular season. Worldwide, soccer, rugby league, rugby union, Gaelic football, Australian rules football all allow ties (or draws, as they are more often called) during the regular season, and then adopt an OT in the playoffs when a winner is required.

If a team knows that there’s going to be no OT, and that the half-game they drop might come back to bite them on the ass at season’s end, they might just pull out all the stops to win the game.

And if you want to give added incentive for teams to avoid a draw, you could do what the Football Association does in England - give three points for a victory, but only one for a draw. This means that splitting a game gives you less than half of what you would have got if you won, and puts you even further behind a team that actually went out there and won their game. Conversely, in this system tying the game doesn’t give you much more than you would have got for a loss, so there’s even more incentive to try something risky in order to get the win.

19

Excellent point, I tend to agree with you. My problem with overtime in the NFL has always been that it was instituted primarily for television. If OT was not an option, you’re absolutely right, coaches wouldn’t take the “wuss out” option that most of them do and play for over time. Instead of playing NOT TO LOSE they would play to WIN.

“Sudden Death” was put in place for the reason mentioned in a previous post: to avoid overtime sessions running too long, thus overlapping with other games, or with other prime time TV.

20

I like the current OT scheme. I don’t think I’d like NOT having OT and having ties. You think there was a messed up playoff picture this year? Wait untill you throw in five or six more tie games.

Having said that, I totally agree with what people are saying about coaches playing for the tie (not to lose) as opposed to the win. An example (channelling TMQ) when your down by 4 with 3:00 left and you punt from the fifty on 4th and short??? WTF Your never going to win like that and your telling your offense you don’t believe they can do it…