The team that ties the score in regulation should kick. Or, yeah, if you choose to kick to open the game, you’re kicking to start overtime

Thanks, I've never seen that.

Comparable situation from the offensive side of the ball.

Baltimore is on offense, with the lead, in punt formation, trying to run out the clock, but a game can end on an offensive penalty. Is it a smart play within the context of the rules? Yes. Does it look bush league and make the league look bad? I think so and think a rule change should have come to dissuade the offense from doing it. YMMV ;)

I like the idea of just continuing at the same spot after the time expires. If Team A scores with no time left on the clock, then they would kickoff. If Team A is at the 50 and time runs out, then they just continue their possession at the 50. First team to score wins.

This way it is just a natural extension of the game and the teams have earned their way to the situation rather than relying on a coin flip.

I personally like the NFL OT rules just fine, but I thought this was funny.

https://i.ibb.co/Sm5wbmV/20220124-124527.jpg

Heh. How fun would that be? :D

Another subtle thing about the great coaching last night. Both teams were able to run really good last minute drives because they each had 3 TOs in their pocket when they needed them.

Well coached teams don't burn early TOs.

While the offenses, once we got into that late game blur, were very impressive... it's also true that they both benefited from a pretty crazy amount of defensive messiness, missed assignments, uncharacteristic gaffes, and the like. If the pace had been less frantic, I think we could have had the telestrator just lit up with WTF moments from the defenses - Bills leaving entirely half the field uncovered, Chiefs guy tripping on air, both teams clearly unable to create a proper coverage alignment on the fly multiple times.

It was a crazy environment, but not sure that explains it all away. It's not like when you're facing either of these offenses, you just anticipate pure slow vanilla stuff.

Those defenses must have been so gassed by overtime. It was probably a foregone conclusion that the winner of the coin toss had it.

They did. You can do it once then it become an additional 15 yard penalty.

Yeah, Romo basically said out loud during the toss what everyone was thinking.

Too bad they can't do like hockey and have a break before playoff OT.

did they literally sell all the beer and dick pills?

I think the NFL is concerned about games being too long and interfering with one another. Worth noting that the playoff games ended before 10pm on the East Coast. Something the other leagues have been too dumb to figure out. But there is a reason they are king.

Just a thought, but what if you got 1-3 subs that you could use from your gameday inactives at any point from the 4th quarter on. Maybe the first team to dip into the pool gets 2 extra players and the other team gets 3?

Thanks, live and learn. :)

I'd argue game length is only relevant for the regular season (scheduling and all that), so they should have different rules for the regular season and the post season.

Regular season: no OT, games can end in a tie.

Post season: play another quarter, if still tied after that, play another quarter

Probably the biggest drawback, though, is that Americans culturally hate ties.

What about

Same rules as now (FG on first possession keeps it going. TD wins it. Sudden Death after) but the team that "receives" the ball in OT starts First and Ten at their own 10 yard line.

dola: And I would support a no-OT in the regular season change. But I am sure that that most fans would hate that.

I like ties making standings look weird, so I'd also be for no OT in the regular season.

I want to see ties in the post season.

Bills and Chiefs tie. They both play the Bengals next week in a 3 way game.

Bills and Bengals start the coin flip. Winner gets to flip against the Chiefs and play against the Chiefs to start.

So, let's say the Bills won both coin flips and wants the ball. Their offense plays against the Chiefs defense. When that series ends, the Chiefs play offense against the Bengals defense. Then the Bengals get to play offense against the Bills defense.

At half time it switches. Chiefs O against Bills D, Bills O against Bengals D, Bengals O against Chiefs D.

If there is a tie at the end of regulation, all tied teams to to the Super Bowl.

You could even modify it and eliminate the lowest scoring team at halftime. If there are 2 teams with the lowest score, the winning team gets to pick who they play in the 2nd half.

It would work and it would be amazing!

Multiball!

SI

Panthers sign new offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo from the Giants...uh did you watch the Giants when he was head coach there?

Didn't we talk about the Ravens spot-and-choose proposal last spring?

One team picks the spot of the ball and the other picks whether to play offence or defence. Essentially a split-the-pie concept. Would it have made a difference last night? I'm not sure. But starting on your 1-yard-line is significantly different as far as limiting the playbook compared to starting on the 25-yard-line.

Ravens to propose revolutionary "spot and choose" overtime procedure - ProFootballTalk

Splitting the Overtime Pizza | Football Outsiders

Everyone is talking about the OT rules, what about the rule that allowed Eric Weedle to get a free shot at Mike Evans? I don't think anyone knew that rule but now that we all know, they can't allow that to remain right?

Why not? It makes sense. As soon as the ball hit the ground, it was first down Rams.

Yeah, that was a very weird edge case, but the logic still feels sound to me. TB did not convert on a 4th down before that hit occurred, so I don't think they should've got the ball back, but I do think there is a case for the penalty yardage being assessed against the Rams offense (e.g. 1st and 25 instead of 1st and 10), because just moving the ball back 15 yards seems like a pretty light punishment.

It wasn't a free shot the Rams were penalized on the play.

I think they should change the rule to account for situations like this where the player does a dirty hit in the direct vicinity of the ball, even if the ball is down. Weddle was interacting with the intended receiver.

I don't think you need to change that. It's not like guys are going to run around taking cheap shots on 4th down. These are split second plays and there is the risk that the ball is in the air when you make that hit. If so, it's a first down.

If we're talking about rules, can we please figure out what is and isn't taunting? I feel like for every taunting call I see, there are 5 others that are equally bad or worse that don't get called.

Then again, I root for a team that lost a game because a player was called for taunting for staring down a sideline.

It strikes me as odd that the same people who endure a constant violence that will leave so many unable to function on a cognitive level later in life could be wounded so much by a little bit of sass that it's worth interrupting the game to march off 15 yards. Bad rule.

At worst, you should get a delay of game if you prevent the other team from getting back in the huddle. Or maybe a card system like soccer - if you become so boorish by your taunting that you deserve three warnings, you just get tossed, no yardage involved.

I hate seeing a great play, lots of emotion in succeeding or failing, and then rather than looking forward to the replay, worrying that it will get undone because someone reacted the wrong way - not that there's much of a standard for that.

I agree. At worst, it should be a 5 yard penalty.

The consistency is what bothers me. Suh is called for taunting for pointing and saying something to the QB. 20 minutes later the team is doing a dance routine in the end zone after a turnover. One of those is taunting and the other isn't?

Rules can't be that subjective.

I agree with this.

So this personal foul should result in automatic first down? If that's the case then all personal fouls should also result in an automatic first down. The problem with that is it only favors the offense. To level the field then, to me, when the offense commits a personal foul it would have to include loss of down with the 15 yds.


Buccs were in a 4th and more than 15 (can't recall exactly what) that's just the breaks. It's not like Weedle was thinking "hey here comes a free shot and I won't be giving up a FD". I would almost bet Weedle's first thought was "oh shit, I just cost us a possession". He was probably as surprised (and in his case relieved) as most that it resulted in 15 yards and not a first down.

I just saw that with 130 yards Sunday, Jamar Chase, a rookie mind you, would become the Bengals' all-time leader in playoff receiving yards.

All defensive personal fouls do result in an automatic first down even if they needed more than 15 yards.

Back to the OT rules - I saw a good suggestion somewhere else: why not just give the home field team the choice? There's no coin so no arbitrary randomness. In the regular season, each team gets the same number of home games so it's fair (ok, it will be once the schedule gets back to 18 games). And in the playoffs, it's just another thing you earn by virtue of your home field advantage and better regular season. It also doesn't have the gimmicky crap like the Ravens and their grade school sibling "you divide and I pick", or some rando FG contest, or the awful college football rules that have a backwards incentive baked in. Just make it part of the home field advantage and call it a day.

SI

#TeamGimmickyCrap

The best part of the Ravens' approach is that it would definitely lead to a Mike McCarthy type coach horribly screwing it up and ending up giving the other team the ball on the 50 or something and then try to justify it in the post-game press conference with a non sequitur like "Well, considering how much cover-3 they were playing, we thought that this gave us the best chance to win."

smoke, fire, Sean Payton out sounds like it's happening... wow

This reporter is several orders of magnitude better than every other local Saints reporter put together. If he's reporting it, it's true:

Sean Payton is retiring, per source

— Nick Underhill (@nick_underhill) January 25, 2022

As a Saints fan, I of course hate this.

But I see it, too. The last couple of years have been a real grind. Definite sense among folks around the team that there was just this . . . stress that had not been there in the past. Totally understandable, but that does not make it less true.

Payton can go be a talking head for a couple of years. If he likes it, he can do like Bill Cowher and stay forever. If he gets restless and wants to get back into coaching in a few years, then multiple teams will be lining up to make him the highest paid coach in football.

Either way, he can wait for COVID to stop being an issue before he comes back.

Dude took one look at being $70 million over the cap with Taysom Hill starting and bailed.

Ah, I posted this in the offseason thread.

I blame Kevin James.

probably belongs in the offseason thread, actually.

Mods wanna move this mini conversation?

I've been doing a dive into overtime results today. There has been an uptick the last four seasons in teams winning in their first possession, like Kansas City did.

So the percentage of wins from teams that have possession first in overtime under the new rule set (implemented for the playoffs in 2010, regular season in 2012) has risen from .529 as of 2017 to .564 now. That includes 163 overtime games.

Under the old sudden-death rules, the win percentage was .584 from 1998-2011.

The 2012 rule change has ended up preserving the home-field advantage (.578) almost exactly as it is for all games. But keep in mind 163 is still too small a sample size for the type of precision we'd need to establish a connection.

There have been 15 first-possession touchdowns in the last four seasons (this includes the KC game) out of 60 overtimes. From 2010p-2012r-2017, there were 20 in 103 overtimes. Is it ticking up? Maybe/maybe not.

There have been 12 first-possession field goals in the last four seasons (20%) versus 18 before then (17.5%). Combined, it suggests maybe a handful of fourth-down conversions, since the league is headed in that direction.

But compare that to 61 first-possession field goals and 14 first-possession touchdowns in the sudden-death period. That was the biggest complaint about the old system - just get 3-4 first downs, center and kick, and your opponent loses.

Let's say the rules are tweaked to give a team a possession no matter what. Then there's less incentive to go on fourth down on the first possession. Then more anti-climactic possessions after a first-possession touchdown. Extra-points are added. You get that tying touchdown and in the regular season, you're probably just about out of time.

I think I'd rather wait to change the rules. We've just had one game with an outcome a lot of people didn't like. What I'd really hate is a switch to some carnival game.

Well, at least 2 if you count KC getting the treatment 3 years ago. I swear i read that 6 of the last 8 OT games in the playoffs have been won on the 1st possession.

It's true. And 7 of 11 since the rule was changed. The average number of overtime possessions in the postseason is 2.0 since the rule changed. And 2.7 during the regular season, which is quite a difference.

Small sample size aside, I wonder why that is. The average score headed into overtime is 24.9 points per team postseason, 23.6 regular season.

So... 7 of 11 in the playoffs (.636) and 28 of 152 in the regular season (.184). That is really strange, to be honest.

Playoff teams typically have better offenses and are more motivated? That’s all I can think of really.

Absolutely this. This is both the reason I want this format and also why I think it won't happen. There's much more thought and analysis that would have to go into this decision than coaches want to have to make.

I do somewhat like the home team proposal. Really amps up the home field advantage even more in the playoffs. My biggest qualm would probably be the wild card round where an 8-9 division winner gets both the home game and the OT possession against a 12-5 team that didn't win their division. That doesn't necessarily sit any better with me than a coin toss.

For playoffs, how about give it to the team with the better record, applying standard tie-break procedures? Teams would still know going into the game whose going to get the ball to start OT.