San Francisco’s Super Bowl LVIII decision notwithstanding, the conventional wisdom regarding two-possession overtime is that the team that wins the toss should choose to kick.
This choice requires more careful deliberation in the regular season, where the overtime period lasts 10 minutes and 10 minutes only.
The proposal that brought the postseason rules to the regular season initially included a return to 15 minutes. The league ultimately decided to stick with 10. Sunday night’s Packers-Cowboys game became the first data point as to the question of whether 10 minutes are enough.
They aren’t. The Packers were rushed at the end of their possession, nearly running out of time before ending the game with a mutually-dissatisfying 40-40 tie.
Coaches want the regular-season overtime rules to be the same as the postseason rules. While they’re never be identical unless and until the possibility of a tie is removed, 10-minute overtime entails different strategies and approaches than 15-minute overtime (which, obviously, becomes unlimited overtime in the postseason).
Yes, it generally makes sense to take the ball second. If the team that gets the opening kickoff scores, the other team will know what it needs. The team that has the ball second will, if the first team has gotten a field goal or a touchdown, go for it on fourth down in its own territory (as the Packers did last night, on fourth and six from their 24).
In the regular season, the ability to know what is needed must be balanced against the very real possibility of having the opportunity to leave the team that gets the ball second with insufficient time to match or beat a score.
The Cowboys used 5:20 of overtime to score their field goal. The Packers had 4:40 to respond. If/when a third possession happens after a pair of scores, there could be little or no time to get in position for a potential game-winning field goal.
A 10-minute overtime sets the stage for more ties. And no one should want more ties. No one should want any ties. Although ties can help avoid the complexity of tiebreakers in the final standings, football is always better when there’s a winner and a loser.
With only 10 minutes, that becomes harder to accomplish.
The NFL shortened overtime in 2017, after the Buccaneers played more than 73 minutes on a Sunday against the Raiders before turning around and playing the Falcons on Thursday. That change came when the NFL was fighting to quiet ongoing criticism of short-week football. Now that the P.R. war against Sunday-Thursday turnarounds has been won by The Shield, there’s no reason to not revert to 15-minute overtime.
So let’s go back to 15 minutes. It will create more apples-to-apples strategic decisions for both regular-season and postseason overtime, especially as to the critical threshold question of whether to take the ball — and whether to secure a chance to leave the team that gets the ball second without enough time to answer.
With 10-minute overtime, the clock looms large. With 15-minute overtime, it becomes less of a factor in the various decisions the teams will make, starting with the most important decision of whether to take the ball first, or second.
