More Overtime and a Cold Weather Super Bowl

It's been awhile since I've written anything here. In fact, the last time I wrote there were 4 teams in the Super Bowl hunt. Now there's just one champion.

Today I want to address two main items: overtime, and the possibility of a Super Bowl being held in New York (technically New Jersey, I think, because the location in question would be Giants Stadium).

We'll do the New York [area] Super Bowl first, because I think it'll be shorter. I haven't really read much or followed a whole lot about this topic, other than to scan a headline here and there about New York wanting to host a Super Bowl, and many people being opposed to this idea. In case you hibernate each January/February you know that the Super Bowl is always played in either a domed stadium, or a warm-weather city. It's obvious that those locations are the only ones considered because the league apparently doesn't want weather to be a major factor in "The Big Game." If that's a deal-breaker for you, then New York would NOT be a good choice for the Super Bowl (it doesn't tend to be real balmy in the Meadowlands in early February).

For me, however, it's not a deal-breaker. I see absolutely nothing wrong with playing the Super Bowl in an outdoor cold-weather stadium. Weather's part of the game. Conference Championship games are routinely played in cold-weather cities (Foxboro, Philadelphia, New York, to name just a few of the possibilities) and those games are just two weeks before the Super Bowl (I doubt the average temperature and precipitation is dramatically different in those cities between mid- to late-January and early February). Also, we all remember how fabulous a game the Ice Bowl was when played in Green Bay with the temperature in the -100s (or something like that... I don't actually remember the game itself because I wouldn't be born for some 20 years afterwards). Good games can be played in bad weather. More importantly, good TEAMS can play well in bad weather. It seems to me that playing football in New York in early February is roughly equivalent to playing baseball in New York in early November, which just happened during the most recent World Series (baseball being a warm-weather game, football being a not-necessarily-warm-weather game).

I'd LOVE to hear YOUR thoughts on this matter. Maybe I'm missing some important information that would change my mind.

Next comes overtime. I'm pretty sure I've written on this before, and I don't mean to bore you. I just mainly feel the need to share some pet-peeves of mine when it comes to this discussion.

First of all, let me say that I've softened a bit on the matter. At the beginning of last season I probably would have told you that the NFL overtime rule doesn't need a single tweak. I'm pretty sure that my reasoning for thinking that way was a preemptive defensiveness to the possibility that a team would use the overtime rules as an excuse for why they lost a game, and I didn't like the thought of that happening. What would best articulate my thoughts would be this: You have to play within the current rule, and not use it as an excuse, so understand that the best quarterback in the world might not get a chance to play in OT if your team loses the coin flip and the defense can't get it done. That being said, if you rid your mind of the current model and were asked to come up with an overtime model, the current one is NOT what you'd come up with.

Much of what's swayed me about this stuff is the fact that special teams have changed a LOT since 36 years ago when the current model was implemented. Kickoffs have been moved back, so more kickoffs are being returned (rather than having touchbacks) and field goal kickers are more accurate. Rather than a team in overtime having to go 50-60 yards to get into field goal range, they now often have to go just 30-40. I don't know the perfect solution to this plan, but the change that the NFL Competition Committee is apparently going to look at this offseason would make it (instead of sudden death) the first team to 7 points that wins, which would encourage teams to go for a touchdown on their first possession rather than just playing for the field goal. That might be a decent start.

I promised that I'd share some pet-peeves about the debate about this topic, and I'm a man of my word, so here we go: Peter King is the reporter who I read most regularly when it comes to the NFL, and he writes more about overtime (he's adamantly opposed to the current system) than just about anyone else too. Therefore, he is the one that my two pet peeves are really directed toward.

First, Peter loves to ask his opponents (those who think the current system is fine), "If the coin flip isn't that important, why has almost every OT coin flip winner in history chosen to receive?" Honestly, Peter, as much as I respect your work and love your weekly NFL column, that's a ridiculously stupid question. The answer is, "Because it's more likely that your team will score on offense than it is that they'll score on defense." It's like asking, "Why do NBA teams try so hard to win the jump ball at the beginning of the game?" In football you don't have to have the ball to score, but even the best defenses in the history of football score less often than the worst offenses in the history of football. You choose to receive because that's how you get points. Duh.

Second, Peter likes to cite the statistic that almost 60% of overtime games since 1994 have been won by the coin flip winner. What's important, however, is how many coin flip winners have won on their first possession in overtime. The reason that's important is because Peter's ideal solution would be to change overtime so that each team gets one possession. At the start of the second team's possession, the game becomes sudden-death. Since coin flip winners win on their first possession somewhere around 34% of the time, that leaves about 26% of coin flip winners who win in overtime on their second possession or later -- exactly what Peter would like to see happen. If that doesn't make sense or you can't quite track what I'm saying because I'm unclear, let me put it this way and just ask for your trust a little bit (or you can ask me for clarification): Peter's real stat is 34%, but he cites 60% because it makes him sound overwhelmingly right. The stats aren't wrong, but he uses them misleadingly.

Still, as I mentioned above, I would be in support of a change to the overtime format, but I don't know what the best change might be. Please, feel free to offer your opinions, or to argue with me in the comments. Thanks for sticking with me through this long post.