Overtime is Overdue

When one watches a game in which one has no stake, such as I did during last night’s Super Bowl, all one can hope for is an evenly matched, competitive game. Thankfully, that accurately describes Super Bowl XLIII.

With the game close in the fourth quarter and threatening to go into overtime, that competition could have quickly become sour, because the rules dictating overtime in the NFL throw off the balance of an evenly matched game.

The outcome of a coin toss is even, unbiased, and fair. But the rule dictating a coin toss preceding the overtime of an NFL game is anything but fair. Even NCAA football, long plagued by the morass of the BCS, can get this part right. Each college team is given possession of the ball and a chance to score. Their coin flip only determines the order of these possessions. In professional football, however, the first team to score wins. And so, in many cases, the offense that wins the coin flip, eventually wins the game.

The rule is as old as Vince Lombadi himself, and about as useful.

A coin flip starts the game as well. When the Cardinals won that toss last night, they became the twelfth consecutive NFC team to do so. Although this goes against all odds, it just goes to show that even random chance can be unfair from time to time.

The sport of football is still evolving and expanding. Since the advent of the forward pass fundamentally changed the outlook of the fledgling game, we can trace historical trends back to certain landmark changes in football. The inclusion of instant replay review and challenges have sought to even the playing field and a revision of overtime policies would be a step in the same direction.

It’s called “sudden-death” because that’s what happens to interest once the game goes into overtime. Even if your team wins out in the corrupt system, it feels as though you received a cheapened victory. In the event that neither team scores, tying is still possible during the regular season. In the modern era of sixty-plus yard field goals, tying is straight out of the leather-helmeted past. A rule change would help to completely eliminate the occurrences of these futile draws. Just as the triple option run from the wishbone formation has given way to the onset of west-coast offenses, so should this arcane practice be brought to its own sudden death.

Oh, and happy Groundhog Day.