6 outside-the-box ideas to fix the NFL's overtime tie problem

The Sunday night game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers gave us our first tie since the Commanders and the Giants tied in Week 13 of the 2022 season. On top of that, with a final score of 40-40, it was the highest-scoring tie game in the past 50 years.

Normally, a tie is just kind of a bummer, but this was a primetime game, and it was the first primetime tie since the Seahawks and Cardinals tied in Week 7 of the 2016 season. Primetime games get more eyes, more attention, and more opinions… and as you could imagine, people hated this tie.

PSA: Don’t kiss your sister

The general idea here is that the more possessions each team is guaranteed, the higher the chance of a tie (unless there is an ultimate tiebreaker). In the past five years, the NFL has changed overtime rules to allow for more possessions for the sake of fairness. That was a bad idea. 

Sure ties happened before those changes, but those were games that deserved to be ties. That Seahawks/Cardinals game? That was a 6-6 tie. 40-40 doesn't deserve to be a tie.

Go back to how it was before

This offseason, the rules changed so that each team definitely had a possession in overtime, and it was a rule change that made absolutely zero sense. Again, there hasn’t been a tie in over two years. Making that change was unprompted and unwarranted. 

Before that change, the rules were that if a team scored a touchdown on the first overtime possession, the game was over. If they kicked a field goal, the second team got a possession. 

That rule was totally fine. If a team gets six points right off the bat, then they win. No questions asked. 

Go back to how it was even before that

Before the overtime rule change in 2022, it was sudden death: whoever scored first won. Did it inflate the value of the overtime coin toss? Sure, but it damn near eliminated ties in games unless the game was so close that it was destined to be a tie. 

It was just a 10-minute period, and if you get points, you win. No fluff or anything like that. If you’re on defense first, you’d better play perfectly.

A shootout

Shootouts are polarizing: some people don’t like that a shootout settles a game when a shootout is not the game. Like, hockey is five-on-five, and then the game is settled with a one-on-one thing. 

The counterpoint to that argument is that shootouts are sick.

Would a kicker shootout where they keep moving back five yards after every make, until one guy misses, be awesome? Unbelievably so. Is that football? No, it’s just a part of a football game. 

In order to pander to the hardos that don’t like cool stuff, you have to say that a kicker shootout would be a bad idea… even if you don’t believe it. However, there’s a different kind of shootout that might work.

There’s a lot of stuff that the UFL/XFL (the spring football league) does wrong, but the stuff that they do right is a whole lot of fun. They started the new kickoff format, and it’s been pretty interesting this season.

They also do a thing where, instead of doing an onside kick, a team can do a fourth-and-12 play from their own 28-yard line. It’s fun. 

Their overtime rules are pretty good, too. “Overtime will consist of alternating attempts to score from the opponent’s five-yard line with no kicks allowed. It will remain a best-of-three format until a winner has been determined.”

In a perfect world, you do this the same way hockey does it: play the full game, play the overtime period, then go to a shootout. It eliminates the whole ‘you lose if you make one mistake’ thing, and it’s still football. It’s the best of both worlds.

Tiebreakers

Nerd stats aren’t a fringe thing anymore. When it comes to analyzing how a team is playing, you have your EPAs, DVOAs, CPOEs, success rates, explosive play rates, and a whole bunch of other stuff. They don’t always tell the whole story, but if a team is trying to boost those numbers, it could be pretty entertaining. 

You might be asking, ‘Jake, you idiot, what are you talking about?’
I don’t appreciate the insult, but thank you for asking, and let me explain:

Since we’re on the topic of nerd stuff, I’d like to bring up the tiebreaker for Rocket League tournaments. If you’re not familiar with Rocket League, it’s a video game that’s pretty much soccer with cars that can fly. 

Rocket League games go to overtime pretty frequently, and they can last a long, long time. In the tournaments, overtime games are sudden death, but have a time limit. If time expires, the team with the most shots on goal is the winner. That encourages teams to be reckless and just launch the ball at the goal to pad their stats.

If NFL teams know that the tiebreaker at the end of overtime goes to the team with the highest success rate or explosive play rate, it would force teams to play more aggressively in overtime. 

In order to make it fairer, the only stats that would count towards the tiebreaker would be stats that come purely from the overtime period. 

If all of this raw data is available, then let's use it.

One drive

Let’s say we don’t want to do the whole college thing, where teams take turns from the 25-yard line... What about a version of that?

Each team gets a drive which starts at their own five-yard line. Whoever makes it the farthest downfield wins. Field goals won’t matter, which means that the entire drive is four-down territory. If both teams score, then do it again. 

It’d also give the NFL a chance to use that new Hawk-Eye measuring system. 

Punt, pass, and kick

On the same idea of using the Hawk-Eye camera system, doing a punt, pass, and kick competition would be perfect, and it’d also take advantage of more of the roster.

If there were a punt, pass, and kick competition at the end of the Packers/Cowboys game to decide the winner, the Cowboys would be able to march out their backup quarterback, Joe Milton.

He’s definitely a worse quarterback than Dak Prescott, but he’s got an absolute cannon attached to the right side of his body. Guys with freak-of-nature traits like that would actually have value.

Also, think of the vibes when a kicker is teeing up a ball that he gets to lay into. That doesn’t happen anymore. It’d be sick.