Editor's note: This story was originally published after Week 11 of the 2021 NFL season.
Whenever an NFL game ends in a tie, it seems that at least one player admits he didn't know it was possible. The player gets mocked, we have our fun and then we all move on.
Here's the thing, though: What if we're the ones who have it all wrong? Instead of ridiculing Pittsburgh Steelers tailback Najee Harris or former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb for not knowing the rules, we should listen to them. Maybe we're the ones who should be mocked. A reasonable person should be stunned to learn that the NFL will halt a game after 70 minutes with nothing decided, in defiance of nearly every other sport and all other levels of football.
"It's nuts," said Godwin Igwebuike, a Detroit Lions tailback, after his team's Week 10 game against the Steelers ended with a 16-16 score.
In fact, it's one of several consequences of an NFL overtime structure that has fallen under increasing scrutiny following a series of rule tweaks over the past decade -- changes that have actually made a tie more likely while leaving gaps in the concepts of fairness, equity and player safety. The team that receives the opening kickoff of overtime still has a significantly better chance to win, despite a 2010 rule change giving each team a possession unless the first team scores a touchdown. And while teams are still averaging about the same number of plays per overtime, even after a 2017 change that cut it from 15 to 10 minutes, ties are now three times more likely.
The overtime issue might not be bubbling at the front of your NFL mind at the moment. But its frequency in 2021 -- 14 games through Week 11, the most in a season to this point since 2015 and the fourth-most in league history over the same period -- demands our attention. Many teams are conflicted by it, and the Baltimore Ravens pushed owners last spring to adopt a relatively radical set of changes designed to make overtime more fair. But for now, a season with historic numbers of close games remains in the hands of what amounts to a rebuilt transmission.
"It's the result of fix on top of fix," said ESPN sports data scientist Brian Burke, who has extensively studied overtime structures in the NFL and elsewhere. "And what results is a complicated set of rules that defeats the original intentions of overtime."
No overtime proposal can be perfect in all aspects, requiring a league to identify and pursue specific intent. When the XFL built plans for its 2020 debut, for example, its executives asked a simple question.
"We had to decide, 'What are we trying to solve for?'" said former XFL director of football operations Sam Schwartzstein. "For us, it was no ties, first and foremost. We had to have a winner. And then it was fairness, time restrictions and player safety."
What is the NFL's priority for overtime? It's everything at all times, which effectively means nothing in particular. Let's take a step back to trace exactly what the NFL's overtime does and does not accomplish, and then move on to some alternative ideas.
Better to be lucky than good
The single most predictive factor in NFL overtime may not be strategy, player talent, coaching skills or home field. It's probably luck. The team that wins the overtime coin toss, and presumably chooses to receive the kickoff, has won 57% of overtime games since the period was reduced to 10 minutes four years ago. And in 2021 alone, that figure is especially high at 64%.
The NFL tried to combat that trend in 2010 by eliminating the possibility of a winning field goal on the opening possession of overtime. That made sense, especially given the increasingly accuracy of kickers from longer distances, but the inequity has not dissipated. Teams aren't necessarily winning on the opening possession, but they are more likely to get additional possessions in overtime than their opponents. Since 2017, the receiving team has averaged 1.66 possessions per overtime compared to 1.13 for the team kicking off.
That discrepancy is due at least in small part to a perceptible decrease in tempo for the team that has the first possession. Those teams are taking the play clock down an additional two seconds per play when compared to the overtime average during the final five seasons of 15-minute extra periods, according to league data. Churning the clock on an opening possession and leaving less time for the opponent to score makes strategic sense in a 10-minute period.
The NFL's decision to cut back overtime to 10 minutes was aimed at reducing the amount of wear and tear on players. Judging that outcome suffers from some level of subjectivity, but the change certainly hasn't reduced the number of plays that players participate in. Overtime periods since that change have averaged 35.5 plays, compared to 35.3 during the time from 2010 to 2016, when the league used the same structure for 15 minutes.
What the 10-minute period has caused, however, is a greater probability of a tie. The NFL has had five ties in 62 overtime games since 2017, a rate of 8.1%. From 2000 to 2016, there were a total of seven ties in 270 overtime games (2.6%).
Imagine a lifetime of playing versions of overtime that couldn't end in a tie, from high school to college across most sports, only to find out that it was a permissible outcome at the highest level for the most popular game in the country.
"I was sitting on the bench saying, 'I've got another quarter to go,'" the Steelers' Harris said in Week 10. "But someone came to me and said, 'That's it.' I've never had a tie in my life before."
No easy answers
If there were a perfect solution, the NFL would have long ago found it. And to be fair, some aspects of the NFL's structure are preferable to other versions, especially its relative connectivity to the rest of the game. NFL teams continue playing by the same basic rules in overtime, with kicking, field position and the clock all acting in their usual roles.
High school and college formats, meanwhile, are untimed and artificially place the ball at a specific yard line with a hard limit on the amount of plays an offense can run before either scoring or giving the ball to its opponent. Such formats can also lead to lengthy games and unnaturally high-scoring totals.
To avoid ties, the XFL settled on a version of the shootout format. Each team would get up to five opportunities to score from the 5-yard line, alternating from one offense to the other until one is mathematically eliminated. Each score added two points to a team's game total, an effort to limit the effect on gambling lines and over/under bets. No XFL games went into overtime during its pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and it's fair to wonder how frequently its teams would have scored from five yards out -- but it fit the league's priorities.
"What it came down to is that not everyone was going to be happy with any one option," Schwartzstein said. "There is always going to be some extenuating circumstance. But there was one thing we decided we couldn't have, which was ties. We wanted it to be fair, and this would have been fair because both teams got equal chances in ways that involved all 22 players on offense and defense. We knew both quarterbacks would see the field. That's what was important to us. And we thought it would be reasonable for time and player safety."
The NFL's commitment to connecting the formats of regulation and overtime limits its options, which is why the Ravens prioritized the issue of fairness. Their "spot and choose" proposal changed the decision for the winner of the overtime coin toss. Instead of choosing whether to kick off or receive, the winner of the coin toss could make one of two choices. It could decide where the ball would be spotted, with the loser of the coin toss choosing whether to play offense or defense first. Or it could choose to play offense or defense, and allow the loser to spot the ball.
In documents that circulated last spring, the Ravens argued their proposal was "fair in principle to each team" because "the team that chooses the ball's initial position can place it as far back as they'd like ... at the risk of being forced by their opponent to start on offense there themselves."
Ultimately, however, "spot and choose" would likely fall into a less strategic and more familiar pattern. Imagine you and a friend were given a cake. One person could cut it and the other would have first choice among slices. To avoid getting ripped off, the smartest cut would be right down the middle. (We're excluding diets from this example!) In a "spot and choose" situation, the team deciding the spot -- which almost always would be the winner of the coin toss -- is most likely to find the point on the field where the win probability is equal for both teams. In a study published last spring, the NFL's own data science department estimated that spot to be the 13-yard line.
So in the end, this approach would likely leave most offenses to start overtime at their own 13-yard line. That would still be more fair, because it eliminates the advantage for the team that receives the opening kickoff of overtime, when it is more likely to be at the 25-yard line or close to it. But it's unclear whether it would lower the chance of a tie, and it wouldn't seem to be as much of a strategic brainteaser as it might initially appear.
ESPN's Burke, meanwhile, suggested eliminating the coin toss altogether and giving the home team the ball first as part of home-field advantage. That shift would remove luck from the equation and also help inform strategy at the end of regulation. But again, ties would remain possible.
If fairness were the only priority, the NFL should just keep playing past the expiration of regulation until there is a winning score. The team in possession of the ball when the clock hit "00:00" would pick up where it left off in overtime. But to play without a clock would run counter to the precepts of the rest of the game, and it would almost certainly prove a hefty risk to player safety.
In the end, it is difficult to conceive of an overtime format that avoids ties and maintains the structure of regulation while maximizing fairness and player safety. Like most everything in life, choices have to be made. The NFL's choice is to address all of these concepts, with structure serving as a nominal priority. It can polish the edges of some if it chooses to diminish others, but for now, what you see is what you're going to get.