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Originally Posted by bigjohn
I would much rather see them play a 7.5 minute (half a regulation quarter) overtime period
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Which is what the World Football League adopted for their inaugural regular season, 1974. That prompted the NFL to extend their existing OT rules to regular season games.
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or 5 minutes, whatever. That way the game is not sudden death. If the game is tied at the end of overtime, declare a tie and go on. I don't understand why a draw is so bad!
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If the NFL were really concerned about adding too much playing time, they could simply go back to before 1974 and not have any tiebreaker in any games except their playoffs and finals. OT added a minuscule amount of playing time per team per year before then; most teams had never played
any OT games.
Of course that would still leave the problem for post-season play, where one could say it was most critical. I don't know why the pros adopted sudden death as their tiebreaker to begin with; it was decades that the NFL had it in the rule book before it ever needed it used. I don't know if they or any of the other pro leagues in the USA that had knockout games had contemplated such, although Canadian football had a tiebreaking provision (similar to the WFL's) that went way, way back. Even leagues that had a championship game, when they weren't big enough to require playoffs to get there, could have left a championship tied because there'd be no game to advance to. I don't know what provision the AAFC had, for instance.
One thing regular season tie games did for the NFL was reduce the need for
standings tiebreakers. Since ties have become such a rarity, there's been greatly increased resort to various statistics to determine playoff standings. The "T" in W-L-T often decided things before. But there was still the question of whether to treat ties as half win + half loss, as the AFL did, or ignore them in computing W-L ratio as the NFL did, which got the Rams in and kept the Colts out one year.
Another factor in producing OT games has been the 2 pt. try. In college football it was used mostly to break ties, while in the AFL it was used mostly to produce them. Since the NFL adopted the 2 pt. conversion, I'm sure there've been considerably more games gone to OT because of a similar philosophy. Going for 2 is considered less than a 50-50 proposition, so they'd rather play for OT if they have a chance to play for the win in regulation, but meanwhile it's given teams a lot of chances to tie scores instead of being 1 pt. behind. In college football it was considered wimpy to play for a tie almost no matter how bad the percentages were; but now that they have tiebreaking frames I suspect they play to tie it in regulation much more often.
You know, I just realized the term "regulation time" or "regulation play" is archaic in NCAA & NFL games. When there are no more games that end in a tie without extra play, a regulation game is a game that goes to tiebreaker if needed. No more distinction in that regard between regulation and championship games, except that in the NFL they can play more than one OT period in the latter. So in the NFL, until they go to the 6th period, they're still in "regulation"!
Robert