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Sudden Death of Perspective

Or, as the late Curt Gowdy would say, the new NFL playoff time rules are a sudden victory for nitpicking.

The rule change mandating that it takes more than one field goal (or less, a safety would do it, too) to win a playoff overtime game on its first possession is not a profound alteration of the game's competitive balance. It's just pointless. And its really sudden adaptation by the league owners raises the question of just how well the moguls are minding their store.

On the moral and ethical side of the league's business, evidence continues to mount that the NFL's attitude towards player brain injury is about 1000 times less enlightened than that of boxing. This is a catastrophe, as in Congress writing some very restrictive law after a tragedy, waiting to happen. Don't forget, it was Teddy Roosevelt who basically mandated the creation of the forward pass.

On the more prosaic balance sheet side, the league and players continue to drift towards a labor conflict that'll cost the owners billions (players, too). You'd think the boys would spend their time together pondering that situation.

Instead, we have the "Don't Make Brett Favre Cry in Overtime" Rule. It's not a travesty of the game, but why fix problems that don't exist?

Critics of the rule have focused on the fact it makes overtime different than the overtime rules for the regular season. As criticism, this even more irrelevant than the rules themselves. Playoff overtime is ALREADY different. It goes on to the end without a time limit. Regular season OT ends after 15 minutes, come what may.

The alert reader will have spotted the word in the above paragraph most relevant to pro football overtime. It is, of course, "end." The purpose of playoff overtime is to end the damn game. Without a winner, how do the playoffs go on?

The purpose of regular season overtime is twofold, to try to end the game with a winner, without unduly disrupting East Coast Sunday night prime time program schedules. Regular season ties made figuring out the playoff qualification tiebreakers too hard for Cal Tech's math department, but postponing "60 Minutes" until 10? THAT'S much more unthinkable than ending a game without letting one team's offense touch the ball.

There seems to be a consensus among the kind of sports journalists who attend NFL owners' meetings (I used to be one) that the moguls will extend the new rules to regular season overtime before the 2010 season begins. That will insure that the rules will be repealed immediately following Super Bowl XLV if not sooner. This change, since it eliminates a common form of winning, will result in more ties. Coaches being what they are, 99 of 100 times, the team getting the ball AFTER a non-winning field goal will play to get a field goal of its own rather than go for six and win. There goes half of the 15 minutes, and you're right back where you started. Getting rid of ties, as noted above, is why they instituted regular season overtime in the first place.

I can't help remembering that the final score of the longest game in NFL history, the Dolphins-Chiefs playoff game in 1971 that went more than six quarters before the winning score, was 27-24.

Want your quarterback to get a chance in overtime? Tackle somebody. We should also remember the most exciting playoff game this past season. The Cardinals missed a game-winning field goal and had to kick off. So they scored a defensive touchdown. Kurt Warner was not heard complaining he didn't get a chance to get his hands on the ball.

posted by Michael Gee @ 3:39 PM