Overtime in three parts

Three thoughts on NFL overtime. First, a couple of rule suggestions of my own. Second, on the topic of bad arguing in sports. Third, on the NFL and public relations.

Rule Suggestions

Nobody has any unique ideas on overtime anymore, but I'll throw out two that I like.

1. College-rules, but no field goals allowed. What's the play everyone loves way more than a 40-yard field goal? Fourth and four with the game on the line. This format would practically guarantee a couple of those. Of course, the right of response is still infinite, but I'm ok with that, because the touchdown (and like in college, you'd require two-point conversions after the first couple of OT periods) requirement should keep things reasonable.


2. Take the NBA's rule and just play one ten-minute period, regular rules. The danger is that that's just long enough for each team to have one possession and score, so maybe instead of regular rules, you again say "no field goals allowed".

The meta-argument

Ok, now given those eminently reasonable ideas, let's move on to something significantly less reasonable: people arguing about things like this. The classic argument in favor of the current overtime system is "the defense should be able to make a stop". I've never understood why, though, someone finds himself able to make this argument without making the simple maneuver of flipping it around: the team that started with the ball never had to make a stop. If you want to make it such a big deal that you should be able to play defense to win a game, why not make the winning team ... play defense to win the game?

It's not even so much the fact that it's a bad argument that frustrates me. It's that it's a bad argument that itself contains the seeds of its own refutation, if only the person making the argument would take two seconds out of his own head to look at things a different way.

Most bad sports argumentation is, thankfully, not of this form. The more typical problematic debating comes from post hoc attempts to justify opinions formed based on vague moral senses -- think about the kinds of things people say about steroids, or Shoeless Joe Jackson, or Gilbert "Finger Gunz" Arenas.

What's fascinating about the overtime debate is that there's almost no way to impose a moral dimension because, as one Tweeter correctly pointed out, all we're trying to do is find a tiebreaker rule that balances the twin aims of allowing the better team to win while also not just playing the game all over again. I bring this up, because that person's actual tweet didn't go far enough to fully make this point. Instead, he basically pulled an Allen Iverson. "We talkin' 'bout a tiebreaker! Think about it! A tiebreaker! Not a game, a tiebreaker!" The problem is that this is apparently supposed to be an argument for the status quo, and that's just silly. Just because it's a tiebreaker doesn't mean that it's permissible to let it be a patently unfair rule.

Throw overtime to the lions

To point my rhetorical guns at the NFL now: what possible reason could there be for not changing the rule? The NFL is an entertainment product. For all that television shows get turned into watered-down pieces of shit, not truly worth of being called art, by the time they're on TV (hi, FOX! How'd Dollhouse turn out after you fucked with the first half of Season 1? Oh, it blew and didn't get ratings? Gee!), the networks focus-group things to death and do end up putting out product that a lot of people want to see. (Those people just happen to be philistines is all.) But the NFL doesn't have any obligation or desire to be art. It merely needs to please the audience. And guess what? The audience is not pleased! Isn't that all that matters?