Part I – The NFL

Originally published 3/10/2022, updated 3/30/2022

Overtime and football have had a long, complicated relationship; In this, the first of a three-part series on the history of overtime in the NFL and college football, I hope to show some of the history of overtime rules in both professional and collegiate football, showing how and why they came about.

While the NFL had no formal rules for settling ties for the first two-and-a-half decades of its existence, it proved prudent and became the first major football league to implement rules regarding ties. Instrumental in creating this was that the league had a championship system, which has historically been the driving factor when leading to tiebreaking schemes.

The NFL had played a championship game since 1933, after a dozen years of electing a champion the way college did until 2014: by voting. Following 1940 football season, owners chose to require a divisional playoff game if the two leading teams of any given division were tied prior to the NFL Championship Game, the antecedent to the Super Bowl. Interestingly, such rules weren't applied to the championship game itself until 1946; originally, the rules were just intended to help determine which teams should get to the championship game, not which teams should win it. These rules sat entirely unused until 1955, when a preseason game between the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams used an extra period to decide the winner; the Rams won 23-17.

Overtime was first used in the regular season just 3 years later, in the 1958 NFL Championship game, "The Greatest Game Ever Played." A 23-17 victory by the Colts over the Giants, the game so impressive, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell (1946-1959) described the game less than five minutes after its completion as follows:

"This undoubtedly was the greatest football game played ever… anywhere!

"I have never seen anything more exciting in my life. When the Giants took the sudden death kickoff, everyone must have figured the Colts had committed suicide. But you've got to go 100 yards to score a touchdown in football and the Giants didn't." (source)

Nonetheless, the extra period had its detractors. Buck Shaw, then-coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, had a lengthy explanation of exactly why he thought overtime was a bad idea. The main thrust of his argument was that:

"The game could deteriorate into nothing. It might drag on for a half or even a full hour. By that time it would be dark and nobody [would be] left in the stands. Then, if there are no lights in the stadium, what would happen?… No, the sudden death is alright for a championship. But not for other games, college or pro." (source)

For Shaw's reasons and likely others, the NFL continued to resist adding a tie-settling element to regular-season games until 1974, and still allows for ties in regular-season games to this day, decades after virtually every other major sport in the United States.

Despite being much longer-running, the NFL's overtime rules have, as of late, drawn significantly more ire than those of college football. The main sticking point is the "sudden death" nature of the format, which has been a feature of the NFL's overtime system since its inception. The sudden-death fifth quarter remained the default overtime system of the NFL when the league expanded regular-season games to feature overtime as well. Unlike divisional or championship games, though, which can go on into perpetuity, regular-season games remain a tie if the fifth period proved to be scoreless. Though this system had its detractors, it remained in place, substantively unchanged until 2010.

The football of 2010, though, was a whole lot different than the football of yesteryear. "Air Raid" and "West Coast" offenses had been slowly transitioning from gimmicky college offenses to fundamental schemes in the pro game. And suddenly, the benefits of the sudden-death system – the emphasis on fielding a complete team on both offense and defense, and the promise of a relatively-quick ending – became serious detractors. It turned overtime into, as many people recently opined following the 2021 AFC Divisional Playoff game between Buffalo and Kansas City, a coin toss.

With the rise of high-flying offenses and the changing role of defenses, the NFL made the decision to change their overtime games into a modified sudden-death format in 2010, allowing the kicking team a chance to make a drive of their own down the field, so long as the first team to get possession was held to just a field goal. They first implemented this system for playoff games only, but by 2012 the addendum had found its way into regular season games as well. Finally, in 2017, overtime was shortened from a full 15-minute period to 10 minutes for regular-season games; playoff games still retain the full-length extra period.

Be they what they are, that's the shape NFL overtime rules are in today. To this day, double overtime has only been enacted 6 times in the NFL, most recently in the 2012 Divisional game between the Ravens and the Broncos. On the other hand, the NFL has allowed 10 non-championship games to end as ties since the modified sudden-death rule change of 2012, and another 17 in the regular season from 1974-2011.

I tend to be in the minority here, but I actually generally prefer the NFL's overtime rules to college football's overtime rules: it makes much more sense to start the period with a kickoff rather than arbitrarily placing the ball at the 25-yardline. Additionally, this allows defense a greater (if still comparatively minor) chance to play an impact in the overtime of a game, since the team has to drive the entire length of the field rather than just a quarter of it.

Finally, I think that if two teams play the better part of five quarters in the regular season and are still tied, they both deserve a portion of that win, since they've shown unequivocally that they're of equal caliber. This seems monumentally more fair than forcing teams to do a gimmicky penalty kick-like two-point conversion shootout, forcing whichever team makes a fluke mistake first to sacrifice the entire win. This may complicate championship seeding somewhat in a crowded field like college football, but the chances of ties complicating the entirety of the top 25 teams, especially in the era of the College Football Playoff, are substantially minor.

Where the NFL overtime loses me is, like many people, the sudden death aspect of the period. If both teams had a chance to score, that would help neutralize some of the bias the current system has towards the high-powered offenses of today's NFL, while allowing a tie in regular-season games maintains the elements of fairness that I like with regards to the win-loss column.

Interestingly, the main complaint against the NFL's overtime system – that both teams don't get a chance with the ball – had been in one offshoot league of the NFL over 3 decades ago. In NFL Europe, an NFL-owned expansion league that ran overseas from 1991 to 2007, each team was guaranteed one possession, though the game still went to a sudden death format if the score remained tied after both teams had the ball. This is closer to what I would like to see in an NFL overtime, but still not exactly right.

Hopefully now you can see why the NFL's overtime system is the way it is, what makes it good, and what makes it bad. In the next portion of this series, I'll look at the history of overtime in college football, why most fans like it better, and what's wrong with it.

  UPDATE

Well, I guess the folks at the NFL are reading my column! That's right, the recent changes were all me, nothing to do with the repeated complaints by teams such as the Chiefs, Bills, and Colts. Here are the updates, which, in my opinion, seem like a great compromise and improve the format in a number of ways I suggested. Note that these changes currently apply only to playoff games.

  Part II – College Football

Originally published 3/17/2022

College football – long the more innovative of the two main branches of the sport – somehow remained a step behind the NFL for decades in terms of overtimes. Unlike the NFL, Division I FBS college football had no formal championship systems whatsoever until 1992, when the NCAA allowed for conference championship games; these games also included allowances for an overtime period. The rule went untested until 1995, when a vote to expand overtime to all regular season games for the 1996 season elected to include 1995 bowl games.

In a stroke of fortune, that very bowl season resulted in the first end-of-regulation tie in a bowl game since the 1988 Sugar Bowl: the Las Vegas Bowl, featuring Toledo and Nevada, saw the 4th quarter end with the score tied 34-34, prompting the first-ever FBS overtime game. After the Wolf Pack's first drive in OT stalled, they settled for a field goal, allowing the Rockets to drive down the field and score a touchdown, winning the game 40-37.

This does, however, discredit the accomplishments of some teams, and the NCAA as a whole, on the lower levels of college football. Though formal championships were a non-factor at the FBS level until 1992, a full-fledged championship system has been in the other levels of college football for much longer than the overdue 2014 College Football Playoff system. In fact, Division III has held a championship playoff since 1973, and experienced their first overtime game just three years later, in 1976, when Buena Vista beat Carroll-Wisconsin 20-14. In 1981, the NCAA allowed for overtime games in all levels below D-IA (now FBS). FBS overtime was the last to the party among college programs by 15 years, and over half a century behind the NFL.

With their overtime rules being newer, the NCAA has had less time to mess around with the rules of their tiebreaking method; they've remained virtually unchanged since their adoption in 1996. Each team starts at their opponent's 25-yard line, with teams alternating possessions until one finally comes out on top. Before the 1997 season, teams were required to attempt a two-point conversion rather than an extra point if they scored a touchdown after the second overtime. This system, based on what is called the "Kansas Plan" (so-named thanks to its implementation in 1971 by the Kansas High School Activities Association), seemed to work more-or-less swimmingly until Thanksgiving Weekend of 2018, when Texas A&M and LSU traded touchdown after touchdown in primetime. After being tied 31-all at the end of regulation, seven overtimes fomented in a 74-72 final score in favor of the Aggies.

The NCAA, hoping to keep such a situation from ever happening again, endeavored to shorten future overtime games: starting in 2019, rather than organizing a scoring drive, teams were required to attempt two-point conversions if they made a touchdown after the third overtime. If play reached a fifth overtime, two-pointers were all the teams tried. In 2021, things were shifted forward, leaving only one regular drive that started from the 25; if play reached a second overtime, teams would again start from the 25 but were then required to attempt a two-point conversion; and finally, if play reached a third overtime, teams only could run two-point plays.

While brilliant in theory, this proved no better at keeping overtimes short than any of the old theories. In fact, in the very first year of its implementation, Illinois and Penn State fought out 9 periods of overtime in a 20-18 rockfight, with the Illini scoring 10 and the Nittany Lions 8 in the extra periods.

Like the NFL's overtime, college football's overtime has problems. One is that, as mentioned earlier, play starts at the opponents 25. For starters, this puts a tremendous pressure on the defense to prevent one, or maybe two first down in a sport where the average defense (UTSA) allowed 5.6 yards per play. This seems even more bleak when you consider that, even back in 2012, a team had a 50% chance of scoring if they had a first-down at their opponent's 25-yard line, and an equal likelihood of scoring a field goal were they to simply take a knee for the first the first three downs.

The other problem is that dozens of fans (myself included), and plenty of coaches, think it's gimmicky. Frequently, it's compared derisively to penalty shootouts in hockey and soccer; even more so since the 2019 addendums. Steve Shaw can pontificate all he'd like about how "Sometimes the only way you get a differential between the two teams is a 2-point play," and purport that "has been recognized for quite some time," but that doesn't really help legitimize it to me.

In addition to Shaw's comments, there are, however, some valid rationale to why the NCAA chose the 25; the point is to get it over with relatively quickly, whether anyone involved likes it or not. As one-time chair of the NCAA rules committee, Vince Dooley, put it, "You need to have some conclusion that wouldn't extend the game too long. We thought some resolution would be solved by putting it close to the goal line." It also helps keep play count to a minimum, reducing the risk of injuries.

There has been a lot of discussion over time about why overtime rules weren't implemented in college football sooner, and the general consensus is generally some combination of "that's just the way we've always done it" mentality and a general lack of interest in adding one. As Dooley put it, "I don't know that we ever thought about it until [1996] in any great detail. Maybe we should have, but we hadn't. There was some precedence – people enjoyed of the great old tie football games, like Michigan State-Notre Dame. It was kind of accepted you battled your way out there and nobody deserved to win and nobody deserved to lose."

Probably the bigger issue, though, was player safety. It was a concern in 1996 when overtime was added to the NFL, and it was one of the main reasons for opposition before then, too. Way back in football's early days, in 1911, Cornell coach Daniel Reed was quoted as opposing an extra period on the grounds of player safety: "As for the extra period of play, when an eleven has worked for 60 minutes the men are tired and pretty well banged up. They have had all the football they can stand. I am extremely opposed to the extra quarter." Northwestern's coach, "Cap" Williams, made the same comment even more pointedly, saying: "Extra period? That would be wrong." (source)

Player safety was the driving factor for the majority of the changes made to football up to this point, including a series of major changes between 1906 and 1911 which included the allowance of increased player substitutions, the division of games from two 30-minute halves into four 15-minute quarters, the outright banning of "mass plays" like the flying wedge, the legalization of the forward pass, and the change from 3 downs to make 5 yards to 4 downs to make 10 yards. These were all instituted with an eye towards limiting the brutality of the sport. That overtimes weren't added to football at that time is little surprise, as, from a safety perspective, they run contrary to every other rule being made at the time.

And so, because of issues involving player safety, a general lack of interest, and the lack of necessity (due to college football not having a formal playoff system), college football begrudgingly became the last major American sports to implement overtime concessions, decades after every other sport in the country, and even every other level of football.

  Part III – Other Options

Originally published 3/24/2022

Despite the long and strenuous opposition to overtime by both the NCAA and the NFL, there was at least some historic basis for playing an extra period in both leagues. One of college football's most storied rivalries, Princeton-Yale, yielded a game with extra "innings" way back in 1881 after the third game in three years ended with no decisive winner. Unfortunately, however, the change failed to yield a winner one way or the other, with the game culminating in yet another tie.

The earliest date I found any game other games mentioning an additional period of play was in, of all places, Kansas, the birthplace of the system college football currently uses to settle overtime games, way back in 1910. In the western salt-mining town of Hutchinson, the teams of Central School and Avenue A played to determine the city "graded school" champion; after regulation ended, an "after session" period was used to decide the victor, with Avenue A taking the laurels, 15-10 (at this time, touchdowns were worth 5 points each). It is not clear what overtime method was used here, or whether it was sudden-death or not.

Naturally, the leagues of football which actually cared about determining an outright, head-to-head champion (who could possibly want that?) continued to play extra periods as needed. In addition to a semi-pro game from 1911 which I'll circle back to, Auburn's Sophomores and Junior Lawyers played a game with an extra period in February 1911; they failed to settle the school's interclass championship after an overtime period of 10 minutes resulted in a tie. The next year the Junior and Freshman classes of Ottawa University (of Kansas – where else!) befell a similar fate after a 12-minute overtime period.

Overtime also entered the semi-professional football world around this time as well; the next recorded incident was in 1912, between the Shelby Blues and the Akron Indians (members of the Ohio League, which later became the American Professional Football Association and later the NFL). Regulation ended in a scoreless deadlock, however, disaster struck the Blues early in overtime: team captain Orville Liddick sustained "a severe knee fracture," allowing the Indians to win the game 13-0; this suggests a full period of overtime play and no sudden-death clauses.

Perhaps opponents of extra periods, like Daniel Reed, Buck Shaw, and "Cap" Williams, were right: overtimes were too dangerous. Additionally, to this point, they had also proved generally not very productive at determining a winner, with most games remaining ties unless there was an injury. Aside from the few overtimes detailed above, and one overtime game in 1919, when the Hampton Roads Training Station football team played a full period of overtime against the Newport (R.I.) Training Station to win 25-6, scoring three touchdowns in the overtime period, I had difficulty finding any other games which required extra periods of overtime for most of the 1910s, and little discussion at all outside the high school level until the 1930s; overtimes briefly fell out of favor.

As discussed in the previous two articles, overtime remained outside the purview of the NFL and college football for a considerably long time. In the meantime, some college coaches suggested a bevy of different methods for solving times. Two of the more unpopular of these suggestions originated in 1930 from Lon Graf, of Peru State College (a Methodist college located in Nebraska), and Maryland professor F. W. Hart, an associate of Terrapin legend Harry "Curley" Byrd. Both coaches suggested using yardage as a measuring stick for determining a winner, but differed in the way they planned to do it. Graf suggested that each team be given four downs to move the ball as far as they could; whichever team gained the most yardage won. Hart, on the other hand, suggested that the entire game be scored based on cumulative yardage.

Yeah, I can see why neither of those caught on.

While the Kansas System of overtime gets all the laurels, it seems as if North Carolina was one of the first states to implement an overtime system for their high school playoffs. Though I found no formal announcement of the implementation of such a system in the historical record, at least half-dozen North Carolina high school football games required an extra inning between 1921 and 1925 in the Tar Heel State. The system used in North Carolina was more similar to the system used by the semi-pro naval teams in 1919, rather than either the replay system (which will be described later), the NFL's sudden death period, or College Football's Kansas Plan.

The first evidence I found of a team playing more than 5 quarters of overtime came in 1925, from an interclass game at Alabama's Marion Military Institute, now a junior college. There, the North Barracks and the South Barracks teams were deadlocked 0-0 through four regulation periods. The conditions remained unchanged through a 5th and even a 6th period, but eventually, after 7 periods, the South Barracks team took the lead. Called "the longest football game in history" by the reporter, it ended in sudden-death fashion, but only because night had fallen and "no lantern was available to tie to the ball."

Detractors who compare the NFL's current system of overtime to a coin flip will find solace in the fact that it isn't the system used in Mississippi in the 1920s. If two high school teams remained tied after a fifth quarter of play, a coin was flipped to determine the outright winner. Perhaps more confusingly, the coin flip determined only who would advance in the playoffs; "honors" for who won the game were officially divided. Such a case was presented in 1928 after the Delta Championship game of Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Greenwood, ended in a 14-14 tie after 5 quarters; fortunately, Clarksdale volunteered to remove themselves from the championship race to avoid missing more school and their regular season schedule.

We could focus forever on bad overtime systems. Instead, I want to take a minute to describe the least practicable one. Remember that 1911 game I said I'd circle back to? Well, we're there. Or, we're getting there, at least.

In addition to the Kansas Plan, the NFL's modified sudden-death system, and the minor ones described above, there remains a third popular system of settling overtime games: the replay – as in, both teams replay the entire game. Few sports used replays in the modern era, and many of them have moved away from it. Soccer moved from replays to penalty kicks in 1970, and Australian rules football, which utilized replays for championship games only, abandoned the replay in any championship game except the final after the 1990 season, and entirely in 2016. Gaelic rules football still primarily uses replays, however in recent years, adding extra time or penalty shootouts have been growing as popular alternatives to settle the game.

The NFL does, technically, allow for replays, though not for ties; additionally, the rule has never been used. Rule 17, Section 2, the "Extraordinarily Unfair Acts", allows the commissioner to require teams to replay part or the whole of a game if it was marred by some unsportsmanlike act that "he deems so extraordinarily unfair or outside the accepted tactics encountered in professional football that such action has a major effect on the result of the game."

The NFL has never used that ruling before, in part or whole – the only time the NFL came close was after the 1982 Snowplow Game, a 3-0 win by the New England Patriots over the Miami Dolphins played in blizzard-like conditions. Near the end of the game, Patriots coach Ron Meyer had a snowplow operator clear away a small patch of grass for placekicker John Smith to attempt a field goal, which he successfully made. Dolphins coach Don Shula protested the action, and while Commissioner Pete Rozelle agreed it was unfair in principle, refused to overturn the result.

Though it's been a long time, an antecedent of the NFL once used a replay system to settle ties. The New York Football League, which saw its most prominent member teams absorbed into what is now the NFL in 1920, used a replay to settle its 1919 championship game. The first game between the Buffalo Prospects and the Rochester Jeffersons, held on Thanksgiving Day, resulted in a 0-0 tie; the following weekend, the two teams played a second time. This time, the Jeffersons won, piling up an impressive 20-0 score.

There are several reasons few sports still use the replay system. First and foremost is the reason Australian rules football moved away from it: scheduling difficulties. It's difficult to convince spectators to come out for a second game (especially if ticket prices are high), and often even more difficult to find a suitable place for teams to play on such a short notice. A second reason is that it can benefit some teams better than others: air-raid offenses, for example, which can often become fatigued over the course of the game, would benefit by waiting to play a second game rather than playing an extra period more than, say, a traditional ground-and-pound offense. Additionally, playing an entire game over again can lead to a heightened risk of injuries, especially if the games are organized on short notice to fit within an existing playoff structure, prohibiting players from getting adequate rest.

Perhaps the most important reason, however, is that the games can simply never end. Supposing both teams are equally matched, and the resulting tie didn't come about from a series of unfortunate breaks on the part of one team, and supposing both teams benefit equally from the allotted period of time between games, the two teams could theoretically play a game over and over, ad infinitum.

This situation – or at least, the closest one documented – arose in the 1911 Atlantic Fleet naval football championship series. It's worth noting that, while this wasn't a college football game per se, the majority of the members of each team would have been roughly college age; additionally, several of these naval teams played college teams relatively frequently; see, for example, the 1911 football schedules of Wake Forest, NC State, North Carolina, or the 1922 football schedule of Washington. So with a little imagination, one could consider this a "college" football game.

One game short of the Atlantic Fleet championship game, the servicemen of the U.S.S. Nebraska and U.S.S. Idaho met on Saturday, October 28th, 1911 somewhere in New York City*, for the laurels of the South Atlantic Fleet. After playing for four 15-minute periods and failing to score, the two teams agreed to play a fifth full-length period**; nonetheless, the score still remained deadlocked at 0-0.

The teams agreed to meet a second time just two days later, on Monday, October 31st. The second game, which kicked off at 1:30 PM at American League Park, was played as part of a doubleheader; the Nebraska and Idaho would meet again to play off the tie, while sailors from the U.S.S. Connecticut and U.S.S. North Carolina played for victor of the North Atlantic Fleet. The Connecticut-North Carolina game, which was scheduled for 3 PM, was won convincingly by the Connecticut, 26-6.

The rematch between the Idaho and Nebraska was again an even fight, described as "a see-saw, in which each side was within an ace of a touchdown more than once, only to meet a stiff defense, which threw back the invaders." Both teams repeatedly threatened to score by both touchdown and field goal, but repeatedly missed their chances due to either fumbles, getting a turnover on downs, or missing the kick. The sailors from the Idaho got the better of the first and fourth quarter (missing a 10-yard field goal "by a margin of inches" in the fourth quarter), while men from the Nebraska seemed to dominate the middle periods of the game. No paper recorded any details of the extra period**.

The teams met for the third and final meeting somewhere in New York City* on Tuesday, November 1st, at 10 AM. Described in pre-game reports as "the final game" despite the fact the match hadn't yet been played, it's unclear if the game would have gone past a fifth period if required, or if the two teams would have resolved the tie by other means. Regardless, it was sure to be stiff competition: if the scores were not indicative enough, the first two games of the series were called "two of the hardest games in the history of football" by a correspondent in Our Navy, a magazine written by and for servicemen at home and at sea.

Unfortunately, virtually no account of the game has been found, so it's unclear if additional periods were required at all. A single report from the New York Times reports that after the game had settled into a 6-6 tie, Idaho left halfback Davis made a touchdown "in the final quarter of a match which just bristled with interesting periods." Though it does say ‘quarter' specifically, that language is decidedly vague. Additionally, in a newspaper article from later that season, future coach of the US Naval football team (1915-16) Jonas H. Ingram implicated that the game was decided with an extra period, but again, the language isn't explicitly clear.

There are a few reasons this game was so evenly matched which make it anomalous when compared to modern football that are worth commenting on before closing. First and foremost was that passing was still fairly limited in terms of what was legal and the risks associated with it; formations on offense and defense even moreso, especially compared to today; in other words, both teams played a style of football which lent itself to long, slow, low-scoring games, and played similar styles which would make a break in games less beneficial to one team than the other. The second, perhaps more important, difference, though, is that the rules of the "battleship league" the two teams played in stipulated that only one officer per team could play in any given quarter, helping keep star players fresh for longer.