COMMENTARY
OT rule needs a flipping change
On Friday, Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning won his record-tying third MVP award in a landslide. On Saturday, the Chargers and Colts played a riveting overtime game in the wild card round of the NFL playoffs. And the league’s MVP never played in the overtime.
This is not a good thing. Manning is the face of the NFL, its ubiquitous pitchman. There’s something wrong when a playoff game, and a team’s season, can end in dramatic fashion before a vast national TV audience without the best player in the sport getting on the field.
Imagine if the seventh game of the NBA Finals went to overtime, and Kobe Bryant sat on the bench the entire five minutes. Or if the Yankees lost a decisive World Series game in extra innings, without getting to bat in the 10th.
That’s the folly of the NFL’s outdated overtime format, which allows the winner of a coin flip the chance to win without giving the opposing offense a chance to respond. Defenders of the system say it’s fine the way it is. They say it makes the NFL unique.
I call it stupid. The Chargers-Colts game had the highest rating for a Saturday wild card game in nine years. The TV rating peaked in overtime. People want more, not less. When Darren Sproles scored the winning TD on the first possession of OT, I was let down. I didn’t want it to end.
It would have been a thrill to see Manning walk on the field with one last chance to keep the drama alive. I’ll bet the ratings would have gone through the roof if that scenario were possible.
I’d like to see a full 15-minute overtime in the playoffs. But change comes slowly in the conservative NFL, where they spend more time legislating against player celebrations than devising a more fair and entertaining way to break ties.
They don’t need anything exotic, like the college system that gives each team a possession from the opponents’ 25. A simple tweak would be an improvement. Give each team at least one offensive possession in OT, so the team that loses the coin flip has less of a disadvantage.
Defenders of the current system say getting the ball first isn’t a big advantage. John Madden says football is a two-way game, and the team that loses the toss needs to play solid defense to get the ball back to win.
Still, winning the coin flip is an advantage, however slight. One study, which tracked all OT games from 1974-2003, found that teams winning the toss in OT won 52 percent of the time. The team losing won 44 percent. The rest were ties.
That’s not a huge difference, but it’s significant. Another study determined that getting the ball first has been a greater advantage since 1994, when the NFL moved the kickoff back to the 30- yard line. During one period from 2006-08, the team winning the coin flip won the game about 60 percent of the time.
Defenders of the status quo point out that OT games are decided on the first possession less than half the time. That misses the point. The team winning the flip has the added edge of getting the ball back first. Getting two of the first three possessions is part of the advantage.
The NFL competition committee has debated overtime many times over the years. More than half the owners voted for a new system on one occasion, but didn’t have enough of a majority. There hasn’t been much momentum for a change in recent years. We’re in an era when more and more coaches are convincing themselves that deferring the opening kickoff is a bright idea.
So we’ll have to live with the current OT for a while. There hasn’t been an overtime game in the Super Bowl. Some day, a team will lose one because of a coin flip. You can bet there will be an outcry, and if we’re lucky, a more sensible way to settle ties.
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