The new shortened NFL overtime is stupid and pointless

Just another false NFL “attempt” at reducing injuries

The NFL loves to tinker with its rules and made news again this week when they changed their overtime rules. Five years ago, the NFL made a big change to overtime rules, making it so both teams were guaranteed an overtime possession unless the first scored a touchdown. Now the NFL has updated the rules again with a simpler change: The overtime period now lasts a maximum of 10 minutes instead of 15.

Of course the NFL is selling this as an attempt to reduce injuries, but you’re naive if you think this makes a real difference. There have been only 21 games in the past five seasons that made it to the final five minutes of overtime. This big injury-reducing change by the NFL saves about 29% of the teams each season from having to play an extra two to three minutes. This new rule decreases a team’s playing time for the entire season by 0.2% — and that’s only for the few that would’ve played the extra minutes.

Don’t kid yourself. The NFL has done almost nothing here to prevent injuries. Everything helps, but this is such a negligible difference it’s like a 500-pound dude only eating two Twinkies every day at 11 p.m. instead of three and calling it a weight-loss program. You’re not fooling anyone, NFL.

So what’s the point of this new shortened overtime then? Is it just a cosmetic change? Is the NFL just trying to save its TV windows from overlapping too much? (Yes, probably.) More importantly, how is this going to affect game play and results? Answer: it’s not going to be pretty.

There are sure to be more ties

Since the overtime rules changed in 2012, there have been five NFL ties. That’s one per season, just enough to screw with all the end-of-season tiebreakers you stare at heading into Week 17 every year.

Last year there were two ties, both memorable because they were nationally covered games on back-to-back weeks. The first was the awful 6–6 Seattle/Arizona game where both teams missed a late field goal on Sunday Night Football. That was followed by a Sunday morning tie in London between Washington and Cincinnati the next week.

Two ties in one season?! The audacity.

If we superimpose these new rules onto the past five seasons, we’d have had 16 ties instead of five. Sixteen ties! That’s six or seven ties in the standings each season. Some teams may even have multiple ties in a season.

Are you getting excited yet? So much sister-kissing!!

Now, not every game that hit 10:00 would’ve ended in a tie. Four of the games ended a play or two later on a field goal — it’s safe to assume teams could have managed the clock differently enough to get that game-winner up. Maybe a couple other games wrap up too and there’s only three or four ties each season. Anything in the name of player safety!

Again, player safety is not the issue here. Those extra three to five plays once every season or two for 22 guys is not going to magically solve the NFL’s many health and safety issues.

The issue is NFL game play, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Winning the coin flip is a huge advantage again

The average NFL drive over the past five seasons lasts around 5.6 plays and takes just over two-and-a-half minutes. Overtime drives tend to last a little bit longer at 6.3 plays and two minutes, 58 seconds. Essentially, you can expect an average NFL drive to be just under three minutes long.

For a ten-minute overtime period, that means around three possessions most of the time. The rare overtime may see four or more, while it will be even more common to see two or less. Three is a bad number. Three is odd and it means the team that wins the coin flip (and chooses to receive, of course) gets an extra possession. That’s a huge advantage!

Of course some drives last even longer. One in six drives over the past five seasons have lasted 10 or more plays, and 11% of them have taken five minutes or longer. In overtime that number goes up to 15%. Once every six or seven overtimes, the team that gets the ball first will have it long enough that the second team gets only one shortened possession — if that.

Last year alone the NFL saw 41 drives last eight minutes or longer. An opening overtime drive that lasts that long leaves the second team with nothing but a couple Hail Mary passes, if they even see the ball at all.

The team that receives the overtime kickoff has a double advantage. If they have one long drive, they can whittle the clock all the way down to leave their opponent almost no chance to win. And if the game is still tied after each team has had an overtime possession, they get a huge advantage controlling the third possession and dictating the rest of the game.

The biggest selling point of the overtime change five years ago was lessening the impact of the silly overtime coin flip. Yet here we are giving it a huge impact again!

This is sure to muck up style of play in overtime

Now imagine you’re an NFL team with any brains at all in the front office (Sorry, Browns fans).

You get the opening overtime kickoff, run a couple plays, and pick up a first down. You’re now on the 35 with under nine minutes left. Three plays later and you’ve nabbed another first down. You’re now near the 50 and there’s only seven minutes of overtime left. What’s the move here?

Actually the smart move might be to speed the game up — with good field position and seven minutes left, a smart team would move quickly to see if they can get a score, knowing the alternate plan is to punt the ball deep and leave enough time for a defensive stop and a chance to get the ball back again, not far from scoring position.

But that’s the smart move, and how many teams outside of Boston are going to do that? NFL teams are run by humans, and humans do not always act rationally. Humans often operate under the idea of loss aversion, acting fearfully to avoid giving up something they think they have.

NFL teams (and fans) think they have already “earned” a tie by making overtime. Most will be cautious in this scenario, fearing the loss of a tie by leaving an opponent too much time to stop them and go the length of the field for a winning touchdown. They’ll try to avoid the loss, when a tie is as bad as a loss in most winning teams’ scenarios.

Most teams will slow the game down at this point. Run another few plays and try to pick up a first down, and keep the clock moving. We’re talking short passes and runs into the line. After a few more plays, you’re either punting it away in your own territory with under five minutes left or you’ve got a first down on the edge of scoring position. You still might not win — NFL coaches notoriously overrate the likelihood of their kicker making a field goal — but at least you won’t lose!

NFL teams score on about 35% of their drives. That means around 45% of the time, an overtime period will start with both teams going scoreless on their first possession (or tied after each kicking a field goal). In that scenario, the team that won the coin toss will get the ball back in a still-tied game, now with around four or five minutes left on the clock.

Again, it’s not hard to figure out how most NFL teams will treat this scenario. With the clock winding down, teams will play it safe and run boring, safe plays to use up time and ensure they don’t lose the game. They’ll play it safe and play for the tie. It’s what they always do.

The shortened NFL overtime has only made an already bad rule worse

Think of it like a soccer game that is tied near the end of the game. The closer it gets to the finish line, the more cautious teams get, and the more defensive they play. Teams would rather take the sure tie — even though a tie in soccer is worth one-third as much as a win, even less than in football — than risk losing something for a much greater gain. It’s bad game play, and it leads to boring terrible soccer. This is what loss aversion does.

And this is what the NFL has given us. The team that wins the opening kickoff now has a huge advantage again, and it’s in every team’s “best interest” to slowly and methodically run the clock out and kill fan interest in the game.

And all in the name of some faux player safety.

If the NFL wants to eliminate long overtimes and add ties, why not just let games end in a tie in regulation? Or give each team exactly one possession in an untimed overtime?

Heck, maybe we should just let the kickers take five shots for each team and call it a win. The rules are already dumb. Why not make them even dumber?

Then again, there is one silver lining.

At least the occasional team that scores a game-winning overtime touchdown is now allowed to celebrate.

Follow Brandon on Medium or @wheatonbrando for more sports, humor, pop culture, and life musings. Visit the rest of Brandon’s writing archives here.