​It's Time to Un-Fix the NFL's Broken Overtime Rules

After just 20 regular-season ties since the NFL adopted sudden-death overtime in 1974, the NFL experienced two (and very nearly three) in seven days. Amidst declining ratings, peaking player-safety concerns and ever-lengthening games, regularly playing five quarters of football is the last thing the NFL needs.

This rash of recent ties is a direct result of the league's complex, wrong-headed overtime rules, instituted six seasons ago to fix something that wasn't broken.

The whole thing started with the indelible image of Brett Favre watching helplessly from the Vikings sideline as the New Orleans Saints ended his dreams of a second Super Bowl ring with a long return, a first down and a field goal.

Such a shame, the thinking seemed to go, that our poster boy Brett Favre didn't even get a chance to win the game.

So the NFL came up with a ridiculous set of rules that A) are so complex that six years we still need on-screen explainers to remind us of all the permutations, and B) still gives the winner of the coin toss a 56/44 advantage in win probability, per Brian Burke of ESPN at his old Advanced Football Analytics site.

By trying to level the OT playing field, the NFL created a monster.

Overtimes were always going to be longer, with more back-and-forth, than under the old rules. We have "modified sudden death" where both teams can score and yet the game will still trudge on. Worst of all, the perception that taking your chances with the coin toss leads to an equal chance of victory actually incentivizes NFL head coaches to play for overtime.

Somewhere, we lost the whole point of overtime in the first place: to end the game.

Football isn't baseball, where there's no contact, nearly zero cardio, and plenty of standing around, with a bullpen full of relievers. It's neither safe nor entertaining for football to slog on for five full periods (or more!). The NFL instituted sudden death because ties are lame, but it's not a reward for conservative play—it's a punishment for not winning in regulation.

The fact is—going back to New Orleans' victory in 2010—Favre had a golden opportunity to win: He had the ball on the Saints' 38-yard line, with 19 seconds left on the clock. All he had to do was complete one more pass to set up a game-winning field goal and history could have been entirely different.

Instead, he threw a pick.

Years ago, Burke suggested a simple, decisive overtime method that results in quick endings, boasts a true 50/50 nominal win probability and requires no Markov-chain models to understand the permutations:

• The home team starts overtime with the ball on their own 15-yard line.
• First score wins.
• That's it.

If the NFL cares at all about entertainment, safety or fair outcomes, they'll drop the Byzantine mess they made six years ago and institute Burke's solution. Or, at least, return to the previous method—and their senses.