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As we approach Super Bowl XLVI, this recent post-season has introduced us to "non-sudden death" overtime rules, enacted by the NFL after the 2009 post-season in order to reduce the chances for a team losing in overtime by a field goal or "cheap" touchdown. What did we see this post-season, the first time to try these overtime rules out? The Denver Broncos beating the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime in the AFC wild card round, an 80-yard touchdown pass against busted coverage, and the New York Giants punching their ticket for the Super Bowl with an overtime field goal in soggy San Francisco to win the NFC championship game over the 49ers.
Well... the league's intentions were good.
I argued this two years ago, and I'll argue it again: There was absolutely nothing wrong with post-season overtime rules, "sudden death" overtime, to begin with. What's "cheapened" overtime is using it during the regular season, something the NFL has done since 1974.
Yes, boys and girls too young to recall an NFL prior to the Pittsburgh Steelers ever winning a Super Bowl... there once was a time when NFL regular season games were only 60 minutes long, and games actually ended... in... TIES!
Well, the NFL owners didn't like ties, something about ties being like kissing your sister (hey... siblings can show affection for each other without things getting creepy) and the need to generate more fan excitement and interest. So, just like moving back the goalposts in 1973 and changing the kickoff line every decade, the owners decided 1973 would be the last season of "rampant ties" and fans going home from stadiums without having a definitive winner, even if it required an extra 15 minutes of play.
And that's how we've had "sudden death" overtime during the regular season these past 38 years.
Want to know how well it's worked, or perhaps made a significant improvement on the NFL game?
This past regular season gave us 13 overtime games, all resulting in winners. The most-frequent teams requiring overtime were the Arizona Cardinals (4 times), the Broncos and Dallas Cowboys (3 times each) -- and the Cardinals and Cowboys played each other in one overtime affair. That means that 9 of the 13 overtime games played this past season involved just three teams... three teams that all finished 8-8.
Think about it: the purpose of overtime is to yield a winner. What do we see? 69 percent of this season's overtime games involved just these three mediocre teams. These teams were mediocre with the benefit of overtime, which means that they were clearly mediocre if overtime didn't even exist. The Cardinals, Broncos and Cowboys all finished 8-8 with the benefit of overtime rules. If we turned the clock back to 1973 and played 60 minutes and not one second more, the Cardinals would've finished 4-8-4, the Broncos 5-8-3 and the Cowboys 6-7-3. Still think your teams had pretty good seasons? No... they had artificially inflated seasons because of overtime rules.
Fans might wonder if playing regular season games under pre-1974 rules impacted the divisional races and playoff seed. Believe it or not, only the AFC West would've produced a different divisional champion, the 8-6-2 San Diego Chargers. The Oakland Raiders would've finished second at 7-8-1, the Kansas City Chiefs would've finished third at 6-8-2, and the Broncos would've finished last. In fact, if we didn't have regular season overtime rules, the AFC West would've produced the same order of finish experts predicted prior to the season.
Warning to all those naive Broncos fans who think the 2011 season was the result of a divine miracle: the Broncos won their division because of luck, dumb luck, which is all regular season overtime boils down to!
In fact, with the exception of the AFC West, every other division and all other playoff seedings were completely unchanged. Heck, even the top three draft spots for 2012 are still the same: 1-Indianapolis Colts (2-14), 2-St. Louis Rams (2-13-1), 3-Minnesota Vikings (3-12-1).
The NFL played a total of 512 regular season games in 2011; 13 games required overtime. This translates to 2.5 percent of games requiring overtime. 2.5 percent is hardly anything; it's barely more than 1 percent according to OWS aficionados. So for such a small percentage, why does the NFL bother with regular season overtime, risking additional injuries to players beyond the risk of playing 60 minute games? There must be more logic than to give mediocre teams less mediocre-looking records, right?
Let's turn the clock back to 1973 and see what pre-overtime regular season records looked like then. Keep in mind that we only had 26 NFL teams and each one played a 14-game regular season. Of 364 regular season games played in 1973 there were 7 ties. SEVEN, accounting for 1.9 percent of all games played.
Which teams were the "tie kings"? The 5-7-2 Green Bay Packers, the 7-5-2 Cleveland Browns, 7-5-2 Kansas City Chiefs, and the 7-5-2 Denver Broncos (no, Tim Tebow wasn't their quarterback). It shouldn't be too surprising to know that 6 of the 7 tie games in 1973 involved either the Packers, Browns, Chiefs or Broncos, since teams that play to ties tend to play to ties with other teams that play to ties.
Got that? Good! Pop quiz at the end of this column!
Okay, so 1973 doesn't seem as tied up as 2011, does it? Perhaps tie games were a chronic problem leading up to 1973 and a decision needed to be made with expansion teams and a 16-game schedule in the future?
In 1972, 5 of 364 regular season games ended in ties, 1.4 percent of all games.
In 1971, 8 of 364 regular season games ended in ties, 2.2 percent of all games.
In 1970, 9 of 364 regular season games ended in ties, 2.7 percent of all games.
So, for the first four seasons after the AFL-NFL merger, a total of 1,456 regular season games were played, 29 ended in ties, accounting for 2.0 percent of all games. This is quite comparable to this recent season. Were any particular teams playing to tie games at a somewhat prolific rate? The Raiders finished 8-4-2 in 1970 and 1971; they played in 6 tie games during the 4-year post-merger period, 10.7 percent of 56 total games played by one team.
The Chiefs finished 7-5-2 in 1970 and 1973; they played in 5 tie games during 1970-1973, as did the Chargers (including 3 during a 5-6-3 1970 season). This accounted for 8.9 percent of games played by each team.
The Packers finished 4-8-2 in 1971 and 5-7-2 in 1973; they played in 4 tie games during 1970-1973. The Broncos also played in 4 tie games during 1970-1973, as did the New Orleans Saints (including 4-8-2 in 1971), the Philadelphia Eagles (one tie each season) and the then-St. Louis Cardinals (one tie each season). This accounted for 7.1 percent of games played by each team.
The Detroit Lions, then-Los Angeles Rams and Atlanta Falcons all played in 3 tie games during 1970-1973, accounting for 5.3 percent of games played by each team.
League-wide, tie games were relatively rare, but for 11 of the NFL's 26 teams, tie games occurred more than twice as often, and that's where the problem appeared to be. Of the 29 tie games played between 1970 and 1973, 11 teams accounted for 20 of those tie games, the same 69 percent Denver, Dallas and Arizona accounted for in 2011overtime games.
Were tie games a problem before the 1970 merger? It depends on how you look at it. During the ten seasons leading up to the merger (1960-1969), the NFL played a grand total of 2,018 regular season games - first starting with 13 teams playing a 12-game schedule, then having 16 teams playing a 14-game schedule. 48 games ended in ties, accounting for 2.4 percent of all games played.
However, the 1967 season (the first involving all 16 teams after the Saints joined as an expansion team) resulted in 9 ties, accounting for 4.0 percent of 224 games played. An amazing 6 of those tie games involved two teams, the 5-6-3 Washington Redskins and the 3-8-3 Minnesota Vikings. Two other teams, the Rams and the then-Baltimore Colts, each finished 11-1-2, but the Rams won the Coastal Division title by virtue of tying the Colts early in the season then defeating the Colts in the regular season finale, the Colts only loss of the season.
FYI: in 1963, the Chicago Bears won the NFL western divisional crown with an 11-1-2 record, besting the 11-2-1 Packers, denying Green Bay the opportunity to be the first three-peat NFL champion. That same year, the Steelers finished 7-4-3.
Three ties is the most any team has ever had during a single regular season since the 1932 Bears finished 7-1-6, the season prior to the NFL playing championship games.
During the 10-year history of the American Football League, a total of 1,204 regular season games were played, 24 ending in ties (2.0 percent of all games played). The most tie games in any single season was 5 in 1965 (4.0 percent of 112 games played by 8 teams), led by the western division champion Chargers who finished 9-2-3.
Looking at the grand scheme of things, the overall rate of overtime games in 2011 is very comparable to the rate of tie games played in the pre-merger NFL, AFL and post-merger combined NFL during 1960-1973. Has overtime necessarily changed the rate of games ending tied after 60 minutes? Not necessarily, but overtime has managed to mask mediocrity a little better compared to what we saw with teams having two or more ties during seasons of the 1960s and early 1970s. The reality is that ties and overtime games are historically more prevalent among a predominant minority of teams in any given season, and the advent of regular season overtime really hasn't eliminated the prevalent mediocrity among these teams more than forcing someone to ultimately win or lose tie games and make league standings and won-loss records more consistent looking.
That's really not reason enough for an extra quarter of play during the regular season. Let’s stop tinkering around with “sudden death” and return it to its rightful place, the NFL postseason, when losers go home. Let’s go back to the regular season rules of 1973, when games end in ties and each team has future Sundays to look towards.
